


Ghosts That We Knew

by AlwaysLera



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: After New York, Clint Has Issues, Clint Needs a Hug, Clint has a band, Coulson has a crush on Natasha and Clint as a pair, F/M, Gen, I apparently really want Clint to have a band, Leveling Out, M/M, Natasha Feels, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark Friendship, Protective Natasha
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-01 10:18:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 25,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1043644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysLera/pseuds/AlwaysLera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of New York, Natasha thought they'd all come together. Instead, Clint uses a safeword he and Natasha invented to allow either of them to walk away from their relationship and their life without getting questioned or stopped. </p><p>She and Stark develop a friendship as they try to track him down without alerting SHIELD or anyone else who might want a vulnerable Clint; Coulson comes back from the dead and helps Stark and Natasha; and Natasha grapples with the big question: if she finds him, what then?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ghost

**Ghost (v): To Leave With the Right to All the Answers to All the Questions that Cannot Be Asked**

_Thirty Two Hours After the Attack on New York_

           No knot could hold her except the one that slept next to her. She heard him rise in the middle of the night, cool air rushing under the sheets, the ever so slight sound of his feet brushing the hardwood floors. His drawers pulled open, noisy, like the exhale of a long time smoker. They had not used this house in so long they hadn’t rubbed candle wax along the sides of the drawers in awhile to keep them quiet. Here, she opened her eyes, watched his outline pull a few clothes out and stuff them in a dark duffel bag. She did not expect it to be anything other than paranoia—they didn’t have go bags in this house, and after what happened, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he had woken in the middle of the night in a panic about that predicament.

          She sat up, letting the sheets pool around her hips noisily. He paused for a beat, his shoulders stiffening, the lines tightening in the dark, then resumed what he was doing. There was a familiarity to watching him move in the dark, the long lines of his strong and thick torso. In the slim light coming from the curtains and the streets outside, Natasha could see the bruising on his ribs. They hadn't spoken much, only touched and looked and examined each other with a wariness and caution she couldn't remember ever hanging between them before. It had made her uncomfortable earlier, but before they fell asleep, he had sat at the edge of the bed and tugged her by her hips to him. He had pressed his face into the softness of her stomach, his face damp with tears. Her fingers had ruffled his hair slowly, carefully. Then he had pulled her down next to him and kissed her like he was relearning her all over again.

She understood that. Of course she understood that. Natasha's mind had been twisted out and pressed back together, molded into unnatural shapes. Once she had stopped Clint in the middle of the hallway of their apartment building, clutching his arm until his voice low and firm reached her. "What, Tash?"

She had pointed to kids playing in the hallway while their family moved in. "What's that?"

"Playdough." He didn't say,  _You've never seen playdough before?_ Of all the people in the world, he was most aware of Natasha's unorthodox upbringing. Where would she have seen playdough?

She had looked at him then, trying not to cry. "That's how it feels in my head."

She had to look away from him. The awe and pity in his eyes had been too much to bear.

Now, in the dark and slivers of light cutting across him like a blade, she wished he would turn and look at her. When he began to pack his bow and his guns, Natasha felt her heart stumble around her chest drunkenly. Her fingers curled around the sheet, and then slowly released the fabric. She watched the way his fingers trembled catching the zipper and yanking it closed. The surety of his hands had been a constant for her. He never flinched. He always committed with his hands: fingers on the trigger of a gun, fingers releasing a bowstring, fingers inside of her. He knew the world through his hands. He knew no other way.

       He tossed the duffel over his shoulder and went for the door.

            “Clint,” she said quietly, her emotions slippery in her voice. He almost did not pause. She knew his tells. She wanted to see his eyes. The lingering doubt scratched her throat. What if he was moving against his own volition? Her voice tipped over a mountain, tumbled down the other side. “Clint, where are you going?”

            He did not turn around. He remained still, silhouetted in the doorway to their bedroom. Then his hand tightened around the strap of the duffel bag. “Ghost.”

            Natasha couldn’t stop the physical convulsion at the word. Her body doubled over and she pressed her forehead against the sheets, her eyes closed. Without saying another word, he walked away from her. The front door opened and clicked shut behind him. She listened to him turning the dead bolt with a key, a resounding crack as it fell into place. Then the most sickening noise, of the key scrapping against the bottom of the door as he pushed it back into the apartment. He was not coming back. He was not coming back. He had been gone from her, and she thought she had brought him back, and now he was choosing to leave.

            Because the word was a choice. Years ago, when they began to sleep together and it moved, despite their best efforts, toward a relationship, they had developed safe words to save her from her own wildly varying insecurities.

            _“What if I leave? I might do that you know. I might not tell you. I might just have to go,” she snapped, pacing back and forth in front of the bed where Clint was scratching his head and grinning at her. She stopped to scowl at him. “It isn’t funny. I don’t do this—“_

_She waved her hand and Clint gently supplied, “Relationship.”_

_She growled deep in her throat and felt it actualize the anxiety growing in her body. “It’s a risk. It’s a calculated risk. But what if one day it is only a risk with no benefits? What if I leave?”_

_“You leave.”_

_She rolled her eyes. “Like you’ll let me.”_

_He sat up straight in bed then, staring at her with a ferocity in his eyes she hadn’t seen a moment ago when he thought her struggle with feelings was comical. “Natasha, look at me.”_

_She did. He said softly, “I will never ask you to stay if you don’t want to stay. We have safe words, yes?”_

_They did. For both of their sakes, and for reasons that many others would not understand. They had different safe words for different things. She nodded, slowly._

_“Say a safeword and I won’t ask questions. I’ll let you leave. I promise you that. You can safeword out of this,” he said, gesturing between them as she had._

_She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “What word?”_

_He thought about it, and then said, “Ghost.”_

_She considered this. “And you too. You can use the other safewords. Why not this one.”_

_“I won’t be using this one,” he said dryly. “I think the risk is you leaving, not me.”_

It had made sense then. Now, he safeworded on her and she had to let him go without any questions. Because an agreement was an agreement, for better or for worse. Because agreements that held them together: like trust, and faith: were why Natasha made it back across the world within hours, something that should have been impossible, where why Clint sprang back into action after he was freed from Loki’s mind control. A long time ago, Clint had taught her that the tiny agreements of trust and faith were equally as important as the ones like their allegiances to organizations and each other. Building blocks, he told her. She thought of them like the thermals birds rode in the air. Some went down, some went up, and they were all needed.

 She climbed out of bed and went to the window. She watched him walk down the street, looking strong and not defeated, entirely how she ever expected him to walk away from her. She thought at him _I love you. I love you. I love you._ And he did not even turn around. He could not read her mind like he used to and he couldn’t know something that she never told him. She sank back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling.

            The apartment was cold. She was alone. Sleep was elusive. 


	2. Freckle

**Freckle (v) To clean the slate of a single day’s follies and mistakes without repercussions**

            Natasha slept with her hand beneath the pillow, palm up, like she always did. She wasn’t sure why she did this but Clint liked to joke she was catching his head as it hit the pillow. He rarely slipped into bed. If he wasn’t climbing in after her, his eyes dark and simmering with lust, then he was throwing himself into bed with a grateful groan. The subtlety that Clint possessed outside the house fell apart when he crossed through the threshold to the apartment they bought together years ago, before they were lovers even. The second bedroom contained all of Clint’s old belongings. It still did. He didn’t come back for them. He didn’t come back for the red-headed woman sleeping in a bedroom she now called ‘hers’ again instead of ‘ours’.

            She tried hard not to think of it as abandonment. The next morning, after sleeplessness, after making coffee by herself and eyeing the key by the doormat that he had shoved back under the crack in the door, she had quietly called Maria Hill and told her that Clint would need some time.

            “What kind of time?” Maria had sounded distracted.

            Natasha looked at his mug on the counter. Empty. “A lot of it.”

            Under normal circumstances, Maria Hill was a better spy handler than she was thirty six after the worst international catastrophe since, well, forever. But these were not normal circumstances. If she heard the strain, the confusion, and the lost sound to Natasha’s voice, she didn’t follow through on her instincts. She might not have even heard them. Natasha didn’t bother to disguise her tone, half hoping that Maria would push her on it. Natasha did not do friendship the way most women did. She had no one to call and tell that Clint had left her, safe-worded and everything, in the middle of the night. She had no one to tell her it was okay to feel blindsided, betrayed, and vulnerable.

            She had no one to tell her that she was feeling vulnerable. That the part where she pulled on a dozen sweatshirts until she could barely move her arms and wrapped herself in blankets and drank enough coffee to fuel a small army was a part of her that understood vulnerability without being able to name the sensation. She no longer had a compass. She no longer had an anchor. She had felt this once before when on a mission in Belize, a stinging gas had been released in the warehouse, temporarily blinding her. Losing one of her senses was not unlike losing Clint.

            Maria Hill told her to let her know if she needed anything. Natasha nodded though Maria couldn’t see her on the other side of the phone and they both hung up. Both women went about their days.

            Natasha went to the Avengers Tower. Steve Rogers was sweeping up glass on Tony’s balcony. He wore a polo shirt like it wasn’t brisk up that high on the Tower, and he looked like the all American boy. Until you saw his face. His eyes were glazed over. He swept the same part of the floor over and over again.

            “Hey, Cap,” Natasha said gently. She walked out onto the balcony, forcing herself not to think about how much she disliked the height and how much Clint would love it up there. She handed a confused looking Steve a cup of coffee. “Stark’s got robots that can clean this up.”

            “It makes me feel better,” Steve admitted, and rested the broom against the wall. He took the cup of coffee and sipped it, sighing with relief. “How are you?”

            Natasha scanned the city with a critical eye. The number of helicopters circling them and downtown Manhattan was still absurd. There was no point in trying to hide her alliances these days. Her face was on the front page of the New York Times. “I’ve been better.”

            “How’s Hawkeye?” Steve was as awkward about asking her about Clint as Tony had been. The only one who didn’t seem to care about finding out that the Black Widow and Hawkeye were a thing was Dr. Banner. Then again, Natasha assumed that in the grand scheme of things, this was largely unconcerning to the man who turned into the Hulk.

            Natasha glanced over at Steve, wondering if Tony knew that Clint had left. “He’s been better too.”

            Steve gives her a pitying, wry smile. “Thank God war isn’t won on sentiment, then.”

            Not every war was won on sentiment. Natasha knew this better than most. But in the privacy of her mind and closed doors with Clint, she thought that most of the wars worth fighting were fought on sentiment and for sentiment alone. She had seen some terrible things in her life between the Red Room and some of her assignments for SHIELD. She had done some terrible things in her life. She understood that when people said War, they meant a large scale conflict. For Natasha, and she suspected for Steve and the other Avengers who didn’t know this about themselves yet, there were wars fought for and with sentiment on a much more private level. If it weren’t for the sentiment of hope, she never would have followed Clint off a Parisian rooftop and switched sides to SHIELD. If it weren’t for the sentiment of love, she never would have stayed with Clint and SHIELD all these years. There was, in the end, always the promise of being a better person the next day. And the endless attempts at being a better person were the hardest wars Natasha ever fought. Those wars were the silent kind. The kind that tore people apart, led them to look at rooftops the way Natasha studied the one on the Avengers Tower now, led them to the Hudson River, led them to see a bridge as a way out instead of a way over.

            The most important wars ever fought were not the ones fought and won with weapons of steel and radiation and money. The most important wars ever fought were fought and won with sentiment. With hope. With love.

            Natasha wondered what it meant that she had let Clint walk out of her life. Did obeying the safeword they had made nearly six years before mean that she didn’t fight that war? Had that been a war? Had it been a test? Had she failed?

            She wanted to know how to try again. _I’m sorry,_ she told the sky. _I want him to come home,_ she told all the little yellow taxis streaming by as people made their way to the memorial site downtown. The subway was still severely damaged in the center of town. People didn’t care. They were walking from all over the five boroughs. This was September 11 th all over again. This was harder to understand. Abject hatred was one thing. Dispassionate disinterest in anything other than diabolical rule was harder to fathom. Even Stalin and Hitler had been easier for the human brain to understand than the information Loki gave Thor before they jetted off to their home planet.

            Aliens were not wars that could be won without sentiment. They introduced a whole new level of xenophobia to the common discourse. Natasha tried not to roll her eyes—it’s not like they hadn’t known about aliens long before the public—but still. She understood it. Fear. She didn’t think that this war could be won on fear. Fear, she knew from experience, was a terrible motivator. It was about as good as guilt. And guilt was disempowering. People fought wars for love, and hope, and desire, and narcissism. They did not fight wars out of fear.

            Wars out of fear were self-limiting, as Clint would say.

            She always did like that phrase. Self-limiting. It spoke to a desire in herself to appeal to moderation when her nature and personality were prone to extremes.

            “Natasha,” Steve said gently. “Are you alright?”

            Natasha blinked, focusing again on where she was. “Yes. I’m sorry. I had a concussion. Still recovering.”

            He took her at her word. Eventually they found a second broom and she stayed on the balcony a long time, slowly sweeping glass and contemplating the edge. When she got home, she plugged in her phone as it had died sometime during the day. She was in the shower when she heard the email come through. Her hair still in a towel, she sat on the edge of their—her—bed.

            To: N. Romanoff  
            From: T. Stark  
            Subject: Katniss  
           

            Fury’s starting to sniff around the edges of Katniss’s disappearance. I cleared my own security tapes of your building so you’re safe on my end. What do you need me to do?

           

            Tony thought it was purposeful. He thought she was in on it. She almost wanted SHIELD to find Clint. But she didn’t want him considered AWOL. For a long time, she sat wrapped in towels, contemplating the return email. Finally, she had response.

            TO: T. Stark  
            FROM: N. Romanoff  
            Subject: Re: Katniss

            Not my choice. Meet for coffee at the cute place on 11th?

 

            There was no cute coffee place on 11th. She had said at shawarma that that shop had reminded her of the coffee place on 11th that had stayed open all through every state of emergency because they believed so strongly that coffee was a necessity just like police and firefighters. Shawarma, Tony had declared, had the same status.

            She hoped he remembered. Otherwise he _and_ the SHIELD agents reading this exchange would be confused.


	3. Echolocation

**Echolocation (v): the right to physical space after a particularly difficult assignment**

 

            Natasha blamed Tony Stark for a lot of things in her life. First and foremost was that awful haircut she needed when she played his hot secretary because what SHIELD wants, SHIELD gets. Except for right now. Because Natasha wasn’t sure if the right word for her relationship with SHIELD right now was _trust_. And, though it pained her to say it, post-New York, she couldn’t not say that she trusted Tony Stark. Her heart had jumped a bit in her chest when he fell, unconscious and seemingly dead, back to earth. And while she disliked asking anyone for help, she knew that she and Tony had a few things in common. More now than they did before. First, very few people wanted to work with them (something about difficult personalities) and second, because he had been suspicious of SHIELD long before her. She didn’t want to admit the latter point to him at any time, but she doubted he’d ask her for the admission.

            He was waiting for her at that little restaurant, sitting in a corner table with his trademark sunglasses on. He was drinking coffee that looked too pale to be real coffee. The firemen and police officers coming in and out of the restaurant that was too close to the new Ground Zero to be used by anyone other than superheroes, superspies, and New York’s finest recognized him. A few were approaching him, shaking his hand and thanking him. Natasha watched him curiously for a few moments, watched how he trembled a little when they turned away from him, watched his eyes scan the eyes of everyone approaching him, watched the way he didn’t drink the coffee he was pretending to drink. Clint, she realized, was not the only one rattled to the bones by New York.

            She moved to the table. He pretended not to see her. He was too much of a live wire right now to not see her. She rapped her knuckles on the table. If he wanted to pretend he didn’t see her, she didn’t mind so much. Maybe she should but she understood the little ways in which they all controlled the aftermath of chaos.

            When he looked up, she met his eyes directly. “Hey. Coffee any good?”

            The corner of Stark’s mouth twitched. “Wouldn’t know. Smells weak.”

            She made a disgruntled noise, though he had only confirmed what she already knew. She waited in line behind a police officer who was talking about the dead and dying from a few of the apartment buildings that were damaged by the Chitauri. For the first time, Natasha wished she could turn off her hearing. She had known there would be civilian casualties. There couldn’t not be with the extent of that attack. Still, her mind had been locked on the casualties at SHIELD and the bombs that had detonated inside of her lover’s mind. Guilt prickled her skin as she waited to order tea.

            She paid her absurdly high price for a small cup of hot water and Lipton tea bag before sliding back to the corner table. She dunked the tea bag silently.

            Stark finally said, “I like this disguise. I wouldn’t have recognized you if you didn’t look like you were going to puke every time someone mentioned Chitauri.”

            Natasha’s fingers paused, hovering over her Styrofoam cup, and her eyes lifted to his. She had put in color contacts and tucked her hair under a black cap. It wasn’t much of a disguise but her red hair was enough of a giveaway these days. “I’m not going to puke.”

            He looked down at the Styrofoam cup in his hands. He had started to pick away pieces from the top. Flecks of white floated on the surface of the coffee he wasn’t going to drink. “Sometimes I think I might.”

            Natasha didn’t know what to do, or what to say. She had never been good at this side of missions of New York’s caliber. Usually she and Clint fell into bed, fucked until they couldn’t walk anymore, went to some incredibly small nondescript city they had never been to before, and didn’t say anything for a few days. They’d walk the streets hand in hand, the rare permission to touch each other in public, and they’d eat at little cafes at the bases of mountains, overlooking wild rivers, next to beaches and canyons and wild forests. Without needing to say anything, they’d pack up their bags and go back to work when they were ready. For the most part, SHIELD had let them do what they wanted. Their output and mission success was the highest in the organization for a pair. It bought them privileges.

            As had their relationship. Clint wasn’t much for words, and either was she. They both retreated into their minds and carnal impulses when they were shell shocked and traumatized. They rarely minded each other’s presences, so they sank and surfaced together.

            Natasha felt the weariness and anxiety coming off Stark in waves. She bit her lower lip, chewing it painfully to ground herself. She said quietly, “I think what’s rattled me the most about what happened is how little I was prepared for it. All those briefings with Fury…we knew about the Chitauri, about Loki and about Thor. We had been trained on the possibilities of otherworldly creatures coming here. I just…,” she shook her head. “I didn’t think I’d be going to that war against him. It threw me more than I expected it to.”

            Stark, to his credit, did not make a single sly jab about how much she had just said to him, and how he had never heard her say so much in a single breath before. He just nodded, stared at their Styrofoam cups, and then lifted his with a melancholy mocking jeer on his face. “Cheers to being blindsided.”

            She lifted her cup and tapped it against the edge of his, smiling a little. She sipped at her tea and told herself that it was worth it to be sitting here, as bitter and cheap as it tasted. Stark looked out the window. She watched him closely. For a few minutes, they said nothing to each other and neither of them minded the silence.

            “He left,” Stark said finally. There was no question. He glanced at her. “You understand why I hacked into your building’s surveillance.”

            “It only bothers me because I designed that surveillance system. If you’d like to help me patch it, I’d be grateful,” Natasha managed to say without her voice cracking. Her throat was tight as her mind replayed the image of Clint leaving the apartment silently, the word _ghost_ making waves in his wake.

            “Sure,” Stark agreed. “Why’d he leave?”

            She ran a fingernail down the side of her Styrofoam cup. “He used a safeword between us that prevented me from asking him why.”

            “I thought safewords were just for sex. You use safewords outside sex? Or was this during sex? Never mind, that’s not an image I wanted in my head.” Stark sounded more like himself and Natasha leveled him a look that made him flinch. “Okay, sorry. So he said this word that you guys had in your secret birdspy code that means he could leave with no questions asked.”

            Natasha sipped at the bitter tea. “Yes.”

            Stark leveled her a look. “That word wasn’t made for him, was it.”

            Her hands may have trembled just a tad. “No.”

            Stark nodded, pushing up his sunglasses. “Right. So what are we going to do about that?”

            “I told SHIELD he needed to level out and to give him space and time. They agreed to go through me. They wanted him to come in for a psych eval. I told them there was no point in evaling him when he’d fail,” she explained quickly. “But I need your help.”

            “I can’t sleep with Nick Fury to get your boyfriend out of trouble,” Stark said patiently.

            Natasha cracked a grin at that one. “Now that was something I hadn’t thought of. Are you sure? I’ve heard rumors about Nick’s --,”

            “Don’t!” Stark covered his ears and gave her a look that made heads turn in the sharwarma shop. “God, that’s just…that’s an image seared into my mind now. I can’t get that out, can I?”

            “Probably not,” Natasha said gleefully. She sobered up and focused though, meeting his eyes through the tint of his sunglasses. “My gut says Clint went back out west. Not to Iowa. Too many memories out there. But somewhere West. I want you to help me find him.”

            “I can do that,” Stark said, turning his cup in a circle.

            Natasha narrowed her eyes at him. “For what in exchange?”

            Stark shook his head, standing up. “Nothing in exchange.”

            Natasha crossed her arms. “That’s not how this works.”

            Stark tipped the cup to his mouth and downed the coffee in a single drag. She raised her eyebrows at him. He tossed the coffee cup in the trash and said, “Consider the Avengers. Not with SHIELD or any of their BS. You, me, Cap, Banner. Everyone has an equal say. More good guy stuff than bad guy stuff.”

            He headed for the door and was opening it by the time she formulated a response. “Why me?”

            He looked over his shoulder. “You’re serious?”

            She shrugged. He looked at the crowd of people watching them and then back at her. “I heard you had a ledger to even out. So do I. I get ledgers.”

            The door swung shut behind him. Natasha unfurled the fists at her sides and sat back down at her table. She finished her tea in silence. So Stark too had seen the footage from when she went to speak with Loki alone, from where she said she had a ledger and she’d like to get it out of the red. It was true. Like much of the conversation, she hadn’t said anything she regretted or anything that was a lie. That was the tricky thing about manipulations. Giving truths could be just as powerful as withholding them. And not to matter. She didn’t think the ledger comment in her conversation with Loki was as private or as personal as she once thought it was.

            A very long time ago, she had scowled at Clint, long before they were lovers, when she offered to have sex with him to repay him for him saving her life and turning her toward SHIELD. He had declined—for several years—and she didn’t understand why.

            “ _If you won’t do it for yourself,” she had spat at him angrily. “Do it for me. I can’t stand you being on the red half of my ledger.”_

He had laughed at her. A truly Clint reaction. And with those twinkling gray-blue eyes, like hazy stormy skies over harbor waters, he had reached out and pinched her cheek, a move she hated. “ _Natashka,_ ” he had said coyly, _“I’ll clear your ledger one day.”_

She had stalked away from him then. She didn’t need bad pick up lines. She needed a way to relieve the guilt that hung, heavy and metallic inside of her so she tasted it every time there was blood in her mouth. It took her a long time to realize that living well and gratefully was enough to repay Clint for what he had done for her. They didn’t start sleeping together until after Budapest, long after they became partners, and he had brought up her attempts to trade sex for a guilt-free life one time.

            “ _Is your ledger clear now?” he had asked, staring at the ceiling and refusing to look over at her._

_She rolled over on her stomach, studying his expression. Clint had an open personality and a closed mind. It was a clever ruse. Most people thought him an open book. An easy going, confident guy with incredible eyesight and unflappable patience. She knew better. She knew that his consciousness was a labyrinth with twists and turns and dead ends even he didn’t know. They both walked through his mind with their right hands to the wall, their left hands joined between them. Navigation in the dark without a map, after all, was their forte._

For the life of her, Natasha couldn’t remember what she had said to Clint in the dark then. She knew it had been something to reassure him that she hadn’t come to bed with him unwillingly, or with a scale of balances in her mind. She had come to bed because she wanted him, simple and free and without the outside world peering in. For months, Clint seemed surprised to wake and find her there with him still. It was his wonderment that kept her in his bed, long after they had had sex. Her instincts told her to flee, to create some sacred space inside that bedroom that she and her toxic thoughts couldn’t infiltrate. She thought she needed to make their relationship sex only. But it was the look of unfiltered joy and happiness in his sleepy eyes that made her stay. And by staying, she found something so much better. The bedroom had not become a sacred space. Their entire life outside of SHIELD had. Their apartment had. A space where they didn’t talk about weapons or killing or missions. A space where they cooked side by side, bumping into each other. A space where they argued about Clint drinking the milk straight out of the carton and whose turn it was to take the garbage out.

            Clint had joked one night that they were frighteningly domestic. Natasha had simply replied that she hadn’t ever known there was that type of life for her, or him, or people like them. He had kissed her then, slow and sweet and long, on their couch, in the middle of a Big Bang Theory episode.

            She wanted him to come home. And if it required Stark’s help and joining his Avengers, so be it. She wanted Clint to come home.


	4. Fasolada

**Fasolada (v): the request for the other to give up all control in bed**

From: T. Stark  
            To: N. Romanoff  
            Subject: Catching Fire  
           

            Katniss goes underground in this one right?

 

            From: N. Romanoff  
            To: T. Stark  
            Subject: Re: Catching Fire

            No, she finds the chink in the force field. The next one she goes underground, then she gets bored and goes above ground.

 

            From: T. Stark  
            To: N. Romanoff  
            Subject: Re: Re: Catching Fire

            What? Wait, were you talking in code or something? Did we read the same books?

 

            From: N. Romanoff  
            To: T. Stark  
            Subject: Re: Re: Re: Catching Fire

            What?

 

            From: T. Stark  
            To: N. Romanoff  
            Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Catching Fire

            Let’s do coffee again. I miss your beautiful face.

 

            From: N. Romanoff  
            To: T. Stark  
            Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Catching Fire  
           

            You’re lucky I was doing coffee with Pepper when I read that email. Yes. Let’s, though I do not miss your beautiful face.

 

            From: T. Stark  
            To: N. Romanoff  
            Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Catching Fire

            I forgot that you and Pepper were ‘friends’ or ‘coworkers’ or ‘she was madly jealous until she was pissed off because you were spying on me’. And thank you for calling me beautiful.

            From: N. Romanoff  
            To: T. Stark  
            Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Catching Fire

            That makes you Gale, by the way.

            From: T. Stark  
            To: N. Romanoff  
            Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Catching Fire  
           

            No, that makes me Katniss and you Gale and Pepper Peeta. Okay, I’m really confused. Let’s do coffee.

 

            Needless to say, Stark had not yet found Clint.

            He twirled his coffee stirrer around in his Styrofoam cup. “Think he went go underground?”

            Natasha shrugged, watching the workers outside moving rubble into dump trucks. “For a time, and then he would get bored.”

            “So we were talking about him,” Stark clarified and then sipped his coffee. “I’m fixing my suits. All of them. I want to make a new suit.”

            Natasha shifted her gaze to him. Stark looked thin and pale. He smelled like he hadn’t showered in a long time. Pepper had been expressing concern to Natasha who didn’t exactly know how to respond. Her life was her job, her job was her life. She was only ever able to draw a distinction with Clint. These days, she worked every day and all day. She hadn’t yet been cleared to go back into the field but she was on base seven days a week. They had to kick her out and threaten to withhold her pay in order to get her to work what they called normal hours. She needed her paycheck to pay the mortgage, especially without Clint collecting his and helping out with his half, so she complied. The things, she thought, we do for money and love.

            “You’re alright?” she finally asked Stark.

            Stark’s eyes shifted away from her into his coffee cup. “Yeah.”

            Natasha didn’t need to narrow her eyes to see the lie. “You sure?”

            Stark finally met her eyes. “Are you fine?”

            Natasha’s mouth thinned. “Do I look it?”

            Stark tilted his head slightly. “To the layperson, you look as stunning as ever. To someone who has worked with you twice now, no. You don’t. Take that as you will.”

            “Even a layperson would know you were suffering right now,” she told him gently.

            He flinched a little. He sipped his coffee and pulled a face. “I just have to get back into my stride. You know?”

            She did. She paid their tab and told him to call her with any news. “And,” she added as an afterthought at the door, “if you just need to talk. You have my secured phone number. I don’t mind.”

            Stark didn’t say anything. Natasha left with the nagging feeling she shouldn’t have left. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorter chapter ahead of a LONGER chapter! Thanks for reading so far!


	5. Zapato

**Zapato (v): to leave the lights off and curtains drawn indefinitely.**

            Phil Coulson knew that his return would be, in a word or two, incredibly problematic. He knew the life model decoy they used for his funeral had fooled even his closest of friends and work partners. He had been severely injured by Loki and spent a few days in a hospital but SHIELD had the best technology and the best medical services (they had to) and so less than a month after the attacks, Coulson was on his feet again plus a genetically engineered lower GI tract, liver, and bladder. They weren’t so bad though he wasn’t sure he’d be running around looking for new body parts from the SHIELD labs any time soon.

            The first thing he had to deal with was that Clinton Francis Barton had gone missing. The internal SHIELD report was that he ditched his SHIELD cellphone in the dumpster outside his apartment building and had gone off the grid. He wasn’t using a car they knew about, his driver’s license, or any of his three passports. He wasn’t using a credit card they knew about and they couldn’t find where he went. Coulson was the one adding “that they knew about” to every line of the report. He wasn’t an idiot. He figured that Clint, like most good spies with a solid “fight or flight” response, would have a go pack that protected him even from his employer. If someone had asked Coulson though, he would have always put his money on Natasha being the one to run.

            Then again, it had always been Natasha getting her mind hacked before this run in with Loki.

            Natasha swore up and down to SHIELD that she didn’t know where Clint was, according to the report. Coulson wasn’t sure whether he trusted that reporting or not. Clint, Coulson knew from personal experience, inspired a type of blind devotion and loyalty. People loved him without knowing why. And when they looked at the assets SHIELD had been working to collect, they wanted to know why the mild-mannered sniper who preferred archaic weapons to the high tech guns they could give him belonged with superheroes.

            Coulson always told him, “Just meet him. You’ll understand.”

            They would, and they did. And no one could put a finger on it. Maybe it was the way that Clint never expected anyone to like him or care about what he did. Maybe it was the way that Clint always seemed surprised when people dropped by to see him in the hospital or the cafeteria when he had been away for a long time. He used to turn to Coulson and tell him that he was surprised the person had remembered him. It astonished Coulson back in the day, and it astonished him daily, that Clint could think himself so unmemorable.

            Natasha had made Clint stand out, first as his partner and then as his lover. The attention she garnered naturally made Clint uncomfortable. Coulson had been delighted in a very selfish part of his heart at first. He didn’t mind seeing Clint unsure how to handle a relationship in public. Hadn’t that been the crux of their problems? But then Clint stopped worrying about people wondering how the kid from Iowa got The Girl. And he just went back to being himself, garnering attention as naturally as Natasha did. It bothered Coulson to admit for a few months, but he eventually warmed to the idea: Natasha brought a steadier side of Clint. When Clint had to rise to the occasion and be the steady reliable one, he could and he would for her.

            It hadn’t been a comfortable transition but Coulson finally fell in love with Clint and Natasha as a unit both on and off the field. They smoothed out each other’s rough edges, polished each other’s uneven surfaces, steadied each other’s uncertain sails. Coulson and Clint had never been like that. They had been flint and rock. Sparks flew from them, and the attraction was always there, but they were wind and waves. They made each other choppier.

            Coulson sought out Natasha the first time he got back on base. He didn’t want her to hear the rumors before he had a chance to talk to her. One of his favorite things about Natasha was her predictability. He never thought he’d be saying that about the Black Widow, but there he was, knowing exactly where she’d be at seven am. She was boxing with a bag, her muscles rippling with sweat, her long red hair pulled back and secured with a bandana, her feet constantly moving, her eyes always constant. She was a joy to watch. And Coulson had none of the distraction problems that the guys in the gym had. He could admire Natasha’s exposed skin for its muscle and wish he was still that fit, but he was still capable of propelling himself across the gym floor.

            He caught the bag. Natasha’s fist connected with the stopped bag at the same time her eyes slid over and locked with his. She sucked in a hard breath and dropped her hands to her sides, stepping away from him. Coulson said as gently as he could, “Hey, Natasha. It’s me.”

            “We buried you.” Her body might be trembling but her voice was entirely controlled, her eyes never moving from him. She was assessing him as a threat, playing him with physical weakness and baiting him with her words.

            He touched his eyes, broadcasting every motion. “My eyes. Not Loki eyes. You buried a life model decoy. You can hate Fury for that. But you and I, we need to talk.”

            A shudder ran through Natasha’s body and Coulson held his breath. He had never seen her looking so wrecked. Now that he was standing close to her, he could see she had lost weight. The curves that she had once used to her advantage were slightly less than they used to be. Dark purple half moons hung under her eyes. Her lips were chapped and cracked. Her forearms flexed as she squeezed her gloves together and released them.

            “Come up to my office and talk to me?” he said, still keeping his voice low. There were a dozen eyes in the gym trained on them. No one was talking.

            Slowly, Natasha nodded. She turned and walked back toward the women’s locker room, dazed. Coulson narrowed his eyes at her back. Normally, he’d trust her to come back out and speak with him. And he did understand her stunned confusion, but it was strange, interacting with Natasha without Clint there to buffer them. It felt unsure on both of their sides. Luckily, he didn’t have to go into the women’s locker room to chase her down. She emerged a few minutes later, her hair braided back and wearing a plain black t-shirt and jeans. The Natasha uniform.

            She shoved her hands in her back pockets as they walked to the elevator and took it up to the third floor. They walked in silence down to his office. He shut the door behind them and locked it. He watched Natasha stare at the door, her brow furrowed and her mouth tight. He touched the lock and gave her a raised eyebrow. She shrugged and sat down in a chair across from his desk. He sat down next to her instead of across from her.

            “I don’t know where he is,” she said, a stubborn tone to her voice that said she had repeated this line often.

            “I know. I believe you,” Coulson said immediately. Natasha sat back in her chair, drumming her fingers on the arms. He pointed at the motion. “That’s a big tell for you. I believe you.”

            Her hands stilled instantly. For a few long moments, they sat there, watching each other. Measuring each other up. Coulson had always seen Natasha much more as an agent than he had ever seen Clint. Natasha was almost always all business about him. She played her cards close to her chest and the rare smiles that came from her on base were all thanks to something Clint whispered into her ear. It was an inverse reaction: Natasha smiled, Coulson frowned. Clint was the common denominator. Coulson wasn’t stupid. He knew better than to be jealous in front of a woman whose job it was to seduce and manipulate men for a living. He had pointed her at marks who, for all intents and purposes, were gay men, either privately or publicly, and she would successfully get them into bed, get their secrets, and slit their throats. It had happened at least a handful of times. It was startling to realize that he would not be immune from her skill set, should she choose to use it against him.

            And Coulson was fairly sure that Clint had told her about their history. Natasha always spoke with a certain carefulness to Coulson when they spoke of her and Clint together, or their apartment, or a vacation they took when they took vacations. He appreciated the caution. The jealous and vain part of Phil Coulson, one that few saw and fewer knew to be a strong part of his mind, realized that she gave him more courtesy in this strange false love triangle than he would have given her, had their roles been reversed. It was humbling to know one had less control over one’s feelings than an explosive, volatile Russian spy.

            The Natasha in front of him now was not the same Natasha whom he had known for most of the last nine years. The Natasha in front of him was fragile and unsure, keeping herself together with careful movements as if moving too much would break her at her seams and she would fall apart. Coulson had never seen her look so unsure. Even when she was loud and angry and violent when she arrived at SHIELD all those years ago, she had not seemed this unsure of the boundaries of her own body, her own emotions, her own awareness. Natasha’s strength had lain in her hyper-self-awareness. Her ability to move in a certain, highly controlled way to make others forget what they were thinking or doing, to make others want to think only of her, and do only her.

            If Clint didn’t come back, Coulson realized, he had lost more than his best friend, former lover, and top sniper. He would lose Natasha as well. She needed Clint to help her redefine herself when she blurred at the edges. And here, she was blurry. Blurry, and blurring. Static, and active. Everything that would make her dangerously difficult to handle as an agent.

            “What happened?” Coulson decided that was the best place to start. It would ground her.

            Natasha looked over his shoulder at the painting on the wall behind him. “New York happened. You might remember it.”

            “I don’t remember the parts that are important,” he reminded her.

            Her eyes blinked over to him, and then away again. He couldn’t tell if he was being played or if she was actually struggling to look at him. “We fought off the Chitauri who were attacking Manhattan. SHIELD’s governing council opted to fire a nuclear weapon at New York to prevent what they viewed as an inevitable Chitauri victory. Stark intercepted it and sent it into outer space to their base ship. It detonated. We had shawarma.”

            Coulson smiled wearily. “One day, you’ll be allowed to write a memoir and I want you to remember that line. It detonated and we had shawarma.”

            The corner of Natasha’s mouth twitched. That was the extent of the smile she’d give him. He remembered calling her. Normally he would have said that Hawkeye was compromised, but he couldn’t. He had used Clint’s name, heard the shift in Natasha’s voice as she came out of the Black Widow and into the body and mind of herself, a woman who loved, though she’d never admit it, the circus kid from the middle of America.

            “Clint knocked Loki off the Chitauri so he could be caught. We sent him back the next day, when we were cleaned up. It was hard to sleep that first night. We mostly didn’t. Clint had about seven thousand pieces of glass in his back and he didn’t trust anyone at SHIELD medical to touch him. I removed all of them. He was banged up pretty bad.”

            “Your ankle was fractured,” Coulson noted, half in an attempt to get her to say something he hadn’t read in a report.

            Natasha shrugged. “It was healed pretty quick. Benefits of being a Red Room survivor. Anyway, he was quiet. But I’ve been there. Leveling out, figuring out what is your own thought and what isn’t your own thought takes time. Then he left. In the middle of the night.”

            “Natasha,” said Coulson, watching her eyes glaze over.

            She focused her big blue eyes on him. “He safeworded on me, Phil.”

            There were a handful of times that Natasha had called Coulson by his first name. Almost all of them were when Clint’s life was in immediate danger. And Natasha very rarely mentioned anything that they had between them. She had always been overly concerned with being professional, or perhaps with boundaries considering her boss was also her lover’s ex. Coulson knew about the safewords. Clint had told him about them once, though Coulson couldn’t remember how they came up.

            _“We have safewords,”_ _Clint said, refilling Phil’s beer. “Tasha and I.”_

_Coulson had groaned. “Too much information, Clint.”_

_Clint paused and then tapped his beer against Phil’s glass. “Nothing you don’t know. Balancing act in the bedroom.”_

_“She’s a switch?” joked Coulson, trying to get images out of his head. His own words did not help at all._

_Clint shook his head. “Less that. More trauma.” He had looked down into the neck of his beer bottle then, peeling off the label. “Both of us.”_

_Coulson had been quiet then, for a long time, just studying the face of the man he had once dreamt of marrying. They broke it off after they couldn’t stop fighting and when Coulson wanted Clint on his team. Clint wanted out from under his handler, but pointed out the massive conflict of interest if he was sleeping with his new handler._

_“It would be a COI,” Coulson had told him before they broke up, “even if we weren’t sleeping together.”_

_Clint had broken it off before the switch was made official. It didn’t make it easier to make the hard calls but Coulson was determined to show Clint that he was wrong, that he could put his ex-lover in dangerous situations and be absolutely rational when extracting him from those situations. It was a year after they began working together and stopped sleeping together that Clint had dragged home a bedraggled, angry redhead he claimed was the Black Widow._

_Coulson had been furious. He had petitioned Fury to let him move Clint to a new team again, but Fury denied the request on the grounds that Clint had not had a single issue when working with Coulson._

_“Except the Black Widow,” Coulson had snapped at Nick Fury._

_Fury had the grace to only look amused. “I was pissed off for three seconds then I realized that she is the best asset we’ve ever bought, making Barton invaluable.”_

_Three years later, they were sitting in Coulson’s apartment talking about Clint and Natasha’s nascent sex life. Except now Clint was explaining that it wasn’t just sex they had safewords for._

_“We have them for everything,” he mumbled, scooping up the pile of label shreddings. “It’s…god, I feel like I’ve needed them my whole life. It’s like a dictionary of get out of jail free cards. It’s a code system that allows us to get what we need or want from each other without saying much at all. And God only knows the two of us aren’t exactly good with the words.”_

_Coulson had wondered in that moment if they would have stayed together had Clint discovered the necessity of these words in his life before Natasha. Clint came to their relationship with enough trauma and baggage to sink the Titanic. Would they have lasted if they knew how to let each other off the hook with only a word?_

Coulson studied Natasha. “What’d he say?”

            Natasha shrugged. “Ghost.”

            Coulson shook his head. “It’s not like he gave me a dictionary, Natasha.”

            Pain flashed across the woman’s face, bright and explosive. She wrapped her arm around herself. “Means that the person who said it meant we could leave without being questioned or stopped.”

            He sucked in a breath. “He made that word for you.”

            Natasha swallowed hard and nodded slightly. “Of course he did. We’ve always thought, for nine years now, and I guess mostly the six years we’ve been—together—that I would be the one to panic and leave. Clint Barton doesn’t leave people.”

            Coulson heard it. He heard the silent, _except me. Clint Barton left me_ , that she left off the end of her statement. He reached over and curled his fingers around Natasha’s fingers. Natasha wiped at tears on her face and squeezed his fingers back. For a few minutes, Coulson and Natasha just sat there holding hands.

            Natasha withdrew her hand carefully. Coulson watched her, feeling more helpless now than he had even expected to feel. “What can I do?”

            She shook her head, red braid flying. “There’s nothing to do. You know Clint as well as I do. He’ll come back when he wants to come back and if he wants to come back.”

            “It’s a when, Natasha. Not an if.” Coulson felt obligated to say that.

            Natasha took a deep breath, pressing her palms onto her thighs. “No, it’s not. Let’s not call this like it’s anything it’s not.”

            Coulson winced. “There were so many negatives in that statement.”

            Natasha’s eyes were wary and sad. “No one ever said I was the optimist.”

            That was Clint’s job. Coulson knew that. He stood up and looked around the office for something else to say. “Then it’s an if, but a hopeful when. There’s nothing wrong with hoping he comes back. If you need anything, you’ll tell me.”

            He tried to make it a command not a request. She nodded her acceptance and stood as well. “I have one request.”

            “Shoot.”

            She smiled. “Exactly. I’d like to get cleared to go back out into the field. I’m going stir crazy here and there’s nothing here that doesn’t remind me of what I don’t have.”

            “Negatives,” he reminded her, and then nodded. “I’ll work on getting you cleared.”

            “Thanks, Phil,” she said softly, and then disappeared out of the office. Coulson wished he had spent more of the last nine years getting to know Natasha instead of resenting her. Maybe then he’d know what to do right now. 


	6. Revelation

 

**Revelation (v): the request not to be left alone**

 

            From: T. Stark  
            To: N. Romanoff  
            Subject: Legolas  
           

            Meet me at the coffee shop.

 

            Natasha didn’t waste time. She didn’t reply to the email, just slipped her shoes on under her desk, changed her internal SHIELD chat status to _away from my desk_ , and left base. She had tried driving one of Clint’s cars to work but it smelled like him, felt like him, handled like him, and she had cried in the parking lot, head on the steering wheel. There were too many tears running down Natasha Romanoff’s face in the last few months since Clint left. She had rented her own car. It was absurdly boring. Something sedate. Gray. _Four_ fucking doors. Absurdly good gas mileage that made her roll her eyes. The most exciting thing the car did was stall out at red lights occasionally. The clutch was a little sticky.

            It wasn’t her fault. Unlike, everything else that had happened. The longer Clint was off the grid, the more Natasha began to believe that it was her fault. The safeword had never been meant for him. He had insisted he’d never use that one in particular. He had used other words. Sometimes they met up after they each completed their parts of the mission and he’d hold out a hand in front of her, stopping her from reaching for him and assessing the damage done to his body. One word, _echolocation_ , between them, and she’d step back, give him the physical space he needed. The word gave her all she needed to know about his mental state. They’d shower and clean up, and one of them would crash on the floor or the couch. They couldn’t be trusted to sleep together if _echolocation_ hung between them.

            In the morning, he’d slip into the bathroom behind her, loop his arms around her waist, and press his mouth to her base of her neck. She’d lean back into his touch and he’d whisper, “Thank you.” It would take a few hours every time, but they always slipped back into their normal routine. Safewording never tore them apart. That hadn’t been the intention. Safewords were supposed to be exactly that: words that created safety.

            Natasha couldn’t decide what was worse: that safety for Clint was being away from her, or that the words did not produce what they intended to produce after all these years. She was not convinced that either of them were any safer apart than they were together. Leveling out was a complicated process. She knew that better than most. But she couldn’t help but think when she met up with Steve and Stark and Banner, that she felt a little less like throwing herself off a bridge when she was with them.  It was easier to level out around people who were leveling out from the same experience. And not all of New York. Her experience was vastly different from the waitress who had been writing Steve fan letters for months.

            The summer was melting into fall, though New York City’s weather did not catch the memo. The leaves were turning on the trees, but she wore jeans and a t-shirt on her way to the café to meet with Stark. It was absurd, she thought. She wasn’t normally in New York for the fall. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been in the country for such a long period of time. The turning of the seasons was usually her skipping to a new latitude or hemisphere. Last year she had been in Russia, Argentina, Nepal, Australia, and Iceland for much of the fall. Last year, Clint had been complaining about never knowing what kind of sunglasses to pack, about the changing wind patterns, all the types of arrows he had to pack for each of their assignments. He had not, Natasha remembered, complained about her wardrobe. He rarely did.

            She shut off her heart and turned up the volume in her mind as she walked briskly into the café. Stark looked more alert than he had in the last couple of weeks. When she sat down, he pushed a tablet over to her. She touched the screen and leaned back, her eyes wide.

            Clint, walking the streets.

            Clint, getting coffee.

            Clint, laughing with someone in a grocery store.

            Clint, locking an apartment door.

            Clint.

            Clint.

            Clint.

            Alive, and living, and apparently happy and well adjusted. Very far away from her. Wherever he was. She couldn’t read anything else in the photos. The dull roar in her ear rose to white noise, drowning out everything around her until she could only hear the rush of her own breath and her own heartbeat slamming in her body, a wrecking ball pounding against her fragile ribs. She touched two fingers to her neck, checking her pulse instinctively. It was high, then slow, then high again. She had no concept of time.

            A hand curled around her hand and she blinked, drew in a breath, and nearly threw Stark through the window before she focused and realized it was his hand holding hers. She forced her body to stand down from the threat. The threat was not Stark. She was her own worst enemy in this moment. She could hear her own words trembling back at her through the haze of her mind. _“I’ve been compromised._ ” So this was what it was like to be compromised. Where she lost all of her training and all of her logic the moment that her second-worst nightmare was realized. Clint did not need her.

            And she had to admit that the framework of that sentence required her to admit that she needed him.

            She swallowed hard and said, “Where?”

            “A small town just north of Denver,” Stark said quietly. “I ran an algorithm. Put in his parameters, all of the information I have on him, and let it run. There were a couple of matches and so I sent PIs to track down the matches. The others were obviously not him. This one just came back last night. I ran facial recognition.”

            “You could have just asked me,” Natasha said quietly, zooming in on the photo, reading the street signs, the name of the apartment building, checking the license plates of the cars in the parking lot. “I’m probably as good as a computer program when it comes to his face.”

            “I didn’t want to hurt you if I didn’t have to,” Stark said simply, and then cleared his throat uncomfortably. “I can loan you a plane this afternoon.”

            Natasha’s fingers froze above the tablet and she peered up at Stark. His face was open, honest, and very much desperate. She couldn’t understand his endgame here, other than it was possible, she thought with an aching heart, that he wanted to help something in a concrete way that had less to do with his money than his actions. It was possible, she thought, that Stark wanted to see a happy ending, happiness, and good come of New York. She understood how he could want that.

            “Thank you,” she said, almost adding his name and then diving away from it at the last moment. Then she shook her head. “I can’t, though.”

            Stark’s face twisted from confusion to amazement to frustration rapidly, like a storm on top of a mountain. “Wait— _what_?”

            “He’s happy, Stark,” she said softly, struggling to control her voice. She gestured to the tablet. “He looks happy. He isn’t thin. He’s leaving his apartment. He’s laughing. He’s talking to other people. He’s buying real food. That’s not the Clint I know who is struggling after a mission. The Clint I know eats powdered donuts by the dozens and doesn’t turn on any lights and doesn’t speak English.”

            “Natasha,” Stark said, still looking dumbfounded. “You can’t be serious.”

            She was, she realized. She was completely serious. If the photos had been different, she would have changed her game plan. But for now, she had no right to interfere. He had safeworded, and he had found sanctuary. The problem in the situation—that she was not part of that sanctuary—lay in her court. She couldn’t make her inability to cope without him, without them as a unit, his problem if he did not want it. There were rules and limits to relationships. Clint had respected every boundary she had ever drawn in their relationships. He walked the minefield of her mind, trauma-induced and trauma-informed as it was, and always came out the other side unscathed but not from dumb blind luck. He had treated her with respect and caution and affection. She owed him the same. He had asked for an out, and she had given it.

            There were no take-backs in the game of life. She knew that better than most.

            She pushed the tablet back at Stark. “Take your PI out of the field, Stark.”

            “She’s really good. And super cute,” he added, unhelpfully.

            Natasha shook her head, forcing herself to smile. “It doesn’t matter. He is safe and alive. That’s all I needed to know.”

            “What will you tell Coulson?” Stark looked down into his coffee. He had refused every one of Phil’s offers to meet. He took the faked death of Agent Phil Coulson much harder than the rest of the team. Steve had chalked it up to a dirty but effective method for rallying the troops. Banner wasn’t surprised that SHIELD was a bunch of dirty manipulative bastards. Stark had taken it personally, a slight from one brilliant and socially awkward man to another.

            “Nothing. He hasn’t asked. He won’t.” Natasha stood up and pushed a few dollar bills at Tony. “For my tea.”

            He glanced up at her. “Natasha. You didn’t have tea.”

            She waved her hand, her heart dragging her out to where her car was parked. “Fine. For next time.”

            “Would you sit down?” He sounded irritated at her.

            She had about all she could handle from the world today. “No. I need to go back to work, Stark.”

            “You’re not fooling me, Romanoff,” he snapped, irritation rising in his eyes that narrowed at her. “I’m not stupid. You’re about two steps away from falling apart and trust me, none of us are as equipped to pick up your pieces as he is.”

            “Was,” Natasha said quietly, staring at the door handle. “He was equipped. He chose not to be anymore. I’m going back to base, Stark. Thank you very much. I appreciate knowing that he is safe.”

            She heard Stark’s fluent curses follow her back into the New York sunshine. She sat down in her car and slammed the door shut in relief. Her chest felt too tight. Her hands felt too small. Her legs felt too big. Everything was wrong.

            Her phone buzzed. She slid it open and read the text.

            Coulson: you’re back in the field tomorrow at 0600. Briefing material on your desk.

            Aloud, Natasha whispered, “Thank God.” 


	7. Katastrofa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for sexual violence

**Katastrofa (v): the demand to go off the grid to reset one’s mind when one is unsure of the stability within the body**

 

            She assassinated a state governor in Russia who was corrupt on every possible level. The entire time, Coulson was in her ear. He came into the field with her, playing the Clint where there was a notable absence and variation in her normal routine. Coulson had backed Clint up a few times—in New Mexico, in Venezuela, in New South Wales—but he rarely handled Natasha if she was on her own. It had been startling to hear his voice when he called her in Russia. Stimson had been assigned to handle her for that particular mission. It wasn’t that Coulson was a bad handler. He was incredibly good. It’s why he had difficult agents, like Clint, and like Clint and Natasha together, on his team.

            He just wasn’t Clint. There were no jokes about her ass or her dress in her ear. There were no suggestive comments. He was utterly professional the entire time. He only spoke when necessary. He wasn’t Clint. She missed Clint. She tried to forget about how much she missed him, but it hung there in the back of her mind the entire mission. She seduced the governor. She took him into her bed and before he did anything, she left him on her sheets with a red smile and wide eyes staring at the ceiling. It had been almost upsettingly simple.

            She felt detached the whole time. When she goes to debrief, she was vague and unsure on the exact times. She couldn’t remember how many of his guards she had killed. She didn’t remember if she searched him for weapons. She must have. It would have been trained into her muscle memory. Still, she had forgotten to take his wallet. It was not a robbery. It was a hit. She didn’t see the point in pretending, she told them. In truth, it hadn’t even crossed her mind.

            She knew that she had been lucky. The governor was dumb. She was lucky. She would not always be so lucky. Coulson said nothing to her but she could feel his eyes, his weighty judgment. It sat between them in the space of the plane where Clint should have been sitting with his head on her shoulder, her hand between both of his hands, his bow brushing the back of her neck, the third wheel in their previously functional relationship. She showered alone when she got home and opened her email to see sixteen emails from Stark. She closed her email. She fell asleep alone.

            She stopped going back to their apartment. She used her on base apartment that she hated so much. She couldn’t tolerate going back into the apartment. She wrote the mortgage check. She had her mail forwarded. Most of it was crap. She only sorted through it in hopes that he sent her anything.

            He didn’t.

            She wished she knew how to give up hope.

            Coulson met her on the tarmac before their next mission to Budapest. “Nadezdha,” he said without explanation.

            She gave him a bland look. “Budapest doesn’t corrolate with hope for me.”

            “No,” he admitted. “But the reason you get out of bed each morning is hope. Don’t forget that, Natasha. You might think all’s lost, but you’re an optimist.”

            Mostly she felt like a robot. She was on autopilot. She didn’t know how not to do this job, so she continued to do it. When she wasn’t doing it, she was doing Avengers missions. She just kept going because she had no other option. She couldn’t do anything else, so she might as well do this. She leaned her head back on the plane wall and went to sleep. Coulson woke her when they landed.

            It was an ongoing mission in Budapest, one they kept up for awhile. She had a cover she knew well enough that wearing Maria Teller’s clothing was enough to put her right back into character. Maria Teller worked with dozens of arms dealers. She connected them, helped make the sales, then stole their arms and their drugs for SHIELD and killed them or captured them as necessary. They were so careful with Maria Teller that no one had connected her yet as the common denominator in all of the arms dealers caught in the last five years. She showed up every six months across the world, worked the angles, got the information, seduced a few people, and killed a few every year. Just enough that SHIELD was closer to tightening up the regulations on small arms dealing across the globe. Just enough to keep the arms dealers still in business from getting into drugs and human trafficking. They might not have realize Maria was a part of the equation that led to their frenemies’ demises, but they certainly had realized that the more fingers they had in more puddings, the more likely they were to lose their heads.

            This time, shit went wrong.

            Neither she nor Coulson had expected it. She checked into the same hotel she always did, using the same fake passport that Maria Teller used every time that all of her connections knew was her cover, she wore the same clothes and had the same accent. She had no problems with the beginning of the op. There was nothing to worry about. The other SHIELD agents in place were sharp and attentive. She trusted them as much as she trusted anyone who wasn’t Clint. She trusted Coulson most of all. He worked out of SHIELD’s in country office, however. He wasn’t in the field with her.

            She didn’t wear an earpiece into the room. She had the necklace she always wore, a thin green amulet that transmitted audio and visual, though she couldn’t use it to call for help. It was up to her back-up and Coulson to monitor what her necklace transmitted and make calls based on the information available to them.

            And that was where things went wrong. She had been too busy trying to make sure that her necklace was angled at all the walls of the warehouse that her mark was walking her through that she wasn’t paying enough attention to where he was leading her, and who was around her. It was unlike her to be so distracted, but she was, and it happened. Back-up did not catch what was happening because the camera on the necklace was limited and Natasha did not want to break character. There was too much at risk for her not to tolerate a violation in the name of the greater mission.

            When she was restrained, slammed against a wall, and tied at the ankles and the wrists, she thought it wasn’t the worst thing that had happened. She could still fight back. They weren’t stupid, though. They held her down. A few idiots, she could handle. But she wasn’t a superhero. She was tied up and held down by three full grown men, finger fucked by a goon while her mark watched with hungry eyes, Natasha’s only thought was that she was glad, for the first time, that Clint was not on this mission with her. They slapped her around and shoved her between them. She gritted her teeth when they called her a tease, roughing her up.

            Finally, her mark said coldly, “Enough. Ms. Teller, you understand…my men get bored back here.”

            “Of course,” she smiled at him. “Arrangments can be made, you know.”

            His eyes grew hungrier. She had no intention of coming back to this particular warehouse. When she returned to the hotel that night, she stripped her clothes off in a pile and stood for an hour under the hot water, letting it scald her skin. It had not been the first time when she was not in charge of a sexual altercation. It had simply been a long time. It had never happened with SHIELD before. She had forgotten the way the darkness spread inside of her, slick and gritty with guilt.

            When she walked back into the bedroom, Coulson was standing by the window. The look he gave her was unreadable. She warily moved around the bed, watching him. He followed her with only his eyes. “You have safewords.”

            She flinched. “I didn’t need them.”

            “You forget that we saw and heard everything,” he said, still only watching her with his eyes. His shoulders remained turned against her. “You didn’t code out, Natasha.”

            “I didn’t need to,” she insisted. “I got myself into that situation. I should have been more aware. We’re playing the long game here with this op. You’re risking even by being here.”

            “I’m pulling you out,” he said quietly, looking at the bathroom. “We need to reevaluate your psychological safety.”

            Throwing a fit wouldn’t have helped her argument. She closed her eyes and said, “Please leave. I need to get dressed and prepare to leave as Maria Teller. You’re compromising my cover.”

            He left.

            She sat on the bed and stared at her bare feet. She had no idea what she was doing anymore. She wished she remembered how to fall apart. It took her a few hours before she met Coulson and the team at the airport. They gave her pitying glances. She did not care. They didn’t know what she had gone through before. She could play off the morning as something unfortunate, but a part of the job. Surely, if Maria Teller actually existed, it would have happened to her too.

            _It happens,_ she told herself.

            Coulson touched her shoulder. “You’re Natasha right?”

            Her instincts said, _Natalia._ And for the first time in days, she had a dawning feeling in her chest, something that felt less robot. She blinked up at Coulson for the first time, breathless. She was afraid. 


	8. Resfeber

**Resfeber (v): to request truthful answers to any questions**

 

 From: P. Coulson  
To: T. Stark              
Subject: Natasha

Set aside your anger. I need your help with Natasha. A mission went south in Budapest and she just went off the grid.

 

From: T. Stark  
To: N. Romanoff  
Subject: Graph Paper

You’re off the grid. Do I tell Coulson what he wants to know or no? What’s going on, Spideygirl? You in trouble? I have a suit all geared up and ready to help with whatever you need.

 

From: N. Romanoff  
To: T. Stark  
Subject: Re: Graph Paper

I see what you did there. I’m heading West. I’ll contact Coulson. No need to get your suit all twisted up. But thank you.

From: N. Romanoff  
To: P. Coulson  
Subject: Location, Location, Location

I’m fine. Do me a favor and don’t make me the center of Stark’s overwhelming anxiety right now.

From: T. Stark  
To: P. Coulson  
Subject: Re: Natasha

Effective subject line. Well played, lying dead man. She’s fine. Let her do her thing. We all got to level out. Some of us take a longer time to get around to level out than others. Some of us come back from the dead with shitty explanations. This is a judgment free zone.

From: P. Coulson  
To: N. Romanoff  
Subject: Re: Location, Location, Location

 You aren’t fine. You missed your mandatory psych eval. We both know you’re really not okay.

From: P. Coulson  
To: T. Stark  
Subject: Re: Re: Natasha

Fair point, well made. I assume she’s going to Hawkeye. I have reason to fear for her personal safety.

From: T. Stark  
To: P. Coulson  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Natasha

From herself or from others?

From: N. Romanoff  
To: P. Coulson  
Subject: Re: Re: Location, Location, Location

Calm down. I’m not stupid. If Fury gets on your case, tell him I’m answering email and there’s no way you don’t know where I am based on that. I’m not scrambling this. I’m not shutting you out. I’m doing what I should have done a few months ago.

From: P. Coulson  
To: T. Stark  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Natasha

Both.

 

From: T. Stark  
To: P. Coulson  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Natasha

Death did nothing for your recalcitrance with information. Lucky for you I hacked the mission reports and found out what happened in Budapest. I’m keeping an eye on everyone’s favorite little spider. She’s about sixty miles outside Denver.

From: P. Coulson  
To: N. Romanoff  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Location, Location, Location

Call me when you find Clint.

From: N. Romanoff  
To: T. Stark; P. Coulson  
Subject: Stop

If I need you, I will call you. Stark, get your PI off my trail before I remove his balls from his body. Coulson, I can’t tell if you’re more worried for me or Clint, but I think both of us are going to be fine.

You two are worse than Russian grandmothers.

 

 

Stark called her. She answered, not questioning how he found her burn phone. “Romanoff.”

“You want to talk about Budapest?” he asked her.

She stared at the open road in front of her. There was snow on the ground. She forgot how much she hated Colorado in the winter. The usual road was closed because of a fucking avalanche and so she was stuck taking the long and boring road around the mountain. Her car was whining.

“No,” she said finally. “Look, I’m going to Clint. Isn’t that what you and Coulson wanted?”

Stark sighed. “Romanoff, I’m the king of stupid shit done while mentally unstable. You’re about to make yourself queen.”

Natasha checked her mirrors. “I’m not unstable.”

“Budapest,” he replied quietly.

Her fingers curled around the steering wheel tighter. “I can’t do it anymore. I’m an idiot in the field because half of my brain is always wondering why he was able to walk away. I just have to get this out of my system, know that he’s totally done.”

It was probably the most she had ever said in a single breath to Stark before but he had the grace not to comment on that. He said only, “He might not say what you need him to say.”

“It’s a good thing I don’t know what I need him to say, then,” she answered, flicking on her turn signal and turning into the town where Clint had last been seen. She pulled into the Motel 8, but didn’t turn off her car. She stared into the lobby, barely seeing the ugly carpet, the bored front desk woman texting with her too long fingernails. “It’ll have to be okay, whatever happens.”

“Will you promise me something?” Something clanked in the background and Stark cursed.

Natasha frowned, alarmed. “You alright?”

“Touched a hot stove. Don’t do that,” he muttered. He repeated his question, undeterred.

Natasha turned the car off, sat there in the dark. “Depends on the promise.”

“You’ll call me before you do anything stupid,” he said, his voice low and firm.

She leaned her head back on the headrest. She couldn’t remember when exactly Stark had become her second best friend behind Clint, but it had happened very quietly and enough that she believed in him and his ability to call her on any bullshit. She knew, from experience, that she needed people like Stark in her life. She wasn’t so clueless that she didn’t know this.

“I’ll call you,” she repeated, pressing the promise into her words. “Thank you, Stark.”

“Any time,” he said and then sighed. “You’re there.”

She glared at her dashboard. “You’re tracking me?”

“No. The car turned off. You’re quiet.”

She looked around at the heavily falling snow, the people bundled in hats and scarves, heads turned against the wind. The hotel room lights turning off and on. The ski racks on cars. “I’m here.”

“Call me, Romanoff.”

“Yeah,” she said, and then she hung up.

From: T. Stark  
To: P. Coulson  
Subject: Colorado

She promises to call. I trust her. What happens if Barton doesn’t come back?

From: P. Coulson  
To: T. Stark  
Subject: Re: Colorado

Depends. If Barton doesn’t come back, but takes her back into his life, then she just doesn’t come back to field service.

From: T. Stark  
To: P. Coulson  
Subject: Re: Re: Colorado

And if he doesn’t want to see her. We lose her for good?

From: P. Coulson  
To: T. Stark  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Colorado

The last two months have been bad, Tony. She’s quiet, dissociative, it’s like she’s back to the girl he pulled out of Russia years ago. I didn’t realize how reliant she was on him.

From: T. Stark  
To: P. Coulson  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Colorado

Luckily, I happen to be a topic expert on basing one’s identity on unstable aspects of one’s life. Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to either of them, no matter what he says and no matter what she does.

From: P. Coulson  
To: T. Stark  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Colorado

Fucking Budapest. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Resfeber from otherworldy ](http://other-wordly.tumblr.com/post/62954039930/pronunciation-ras-fa-ber-race-fay-ber)


	9. Sillage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied. One more chapter tonight!

**Sillage (v): to spend time recounting memories**

 

            Clint sat at the edge of the stage, snow dripping off his boots, tuning his guitar. His favorite coffee shop was bustling with people, the regulars who came by even when it was snowing like mad outside, but no one bothered him when he was on stage. It had long since become a sanctuary, a private space, and between him and his guitar, it felt a lot like praying. He still wasn’t sure what he was praying for (redemption, forgiveness, hope, love, her), but it definitely felt like praying. He vaguely remembered going to church as a small child with his family. He remembered being bored, at least, but awed by the idea of religion. He had never been particularly religious.

            She had been more religious than him. That had always surprised him. She loved churches. Whether they were on a mission or on their own, she always detoured to go through local churches. She was silent, reverent, her eyes wide with awe and hope. She liked frescos the best, the paintings she couldn’t touch on the walls and ceilings. She liked the stories and the promises of a better life. She never worshipped and for all he knew, she didn’t believe in God, or heaven, or hell. Those obstacles didn’t prevent her from lighting candles every time they went through a church. He used to love to watch her, the way her lips moved gently in a prayer he didn’t recognize and that she didn’t know. Her fingers held the candle so gently, tipping it so the flame lit another candle, and he thought about the person who would lift her candle to light another one.

            It was the most beautiful slow motion game of dominoes that existed to Clint’s knowledge. And she was the most beautiful player.

            He strummed the guitar and hummed, tweaking the chords just a bit. Behind him, he could hear the other three members of his band setting up. Turns out that that Clearcreek, Colorado was the perfect place for a lot of lost people to form a band and jam in a coffee shop every few weeks or so. They called themselves Petrichor. It had been Clint’s idea. They thought it was just because the word was fun and meant the smell of the hard ground after a rain. In truth, it was her favorite word. He left it like a breadcrumb.

            “Yo, Chet,” said Kyra, kicking him with the toe of her boot. “Can’t find my set list.”

            Chet sounded dumber and dumber as the months wore on. He didn’t use his real name though and Chester was just as close to Clinton as he ever wanted to be. He rolled his eyes. Kyra was his second vocalist and a talented pianist. She just had the memory of a dodo bird. He pushed the set list sideways at her. “Bird, Memory, Into the Dark, Wishing Well, Island.”

            “I can’t believe you’re playing Island,” she muttered, crouching next to him. “You think you can get through it without looking like you’re going to cry or hit someone.”

            He shot her a glare. “Piss off, Kyra.”

            “Just saying. You’re going to make half the women in the room swoon.” She looked up at the crowd in the café. “You keep looking every week like she’s going to show.”

            He knew what she meant. He plucked a pick out of his pocket. “Warm up, Kyra.”

            “Bex needs help with his snares,” she said, getting to her feet. Want to come?”

            Kyra backed him up on vocals and played a mean keyboard. Bex was their percussionist. He rarely spoke, which was probably the only reason he hadn’t signed a major record deal. He was wicked good. Just also wicked odd. And the fourth and final member was their cellist, Jenny. She was a part time teacher, part time cellist, full time caffeine addict. They argued the most but he got along with her well enough. She reminded him a lot of Maria Hill in all the good ways and all the bad ways. But Jenny’s work ethic was solid. She was warming up and tuning already, unlike Kyra or Bex who hadn’t even set up yet.

            Clint dragged himself up onto the stage and out the back door where he helped Bex unload the drums from the back of the truck and up onto the stage. He turned around to pick up his guitar from the front of the stage and start warming up with his bandmates when he saw her.

            She sat at a table alone, her knees pulled under her chin like she was sixteen not twenty nine, her red hair long and loose around her face. Her eyes were solemn, blue, steady as they gazed the distance to him. They looked like summer skies over the ranges out there in the West. She was underdressed for the weather in her black flats, black jeans, green loose-fitted blouse that looked like it couldn’t keep her warm if it tried. She was thin, tired looking, bags under her wary eyes.

            He stepped off the stage and took a half step toward her, watched her suck in a breath and let it out slowly. She looked like the girl he found in Russia nine years ago. He wanted to hug her, or kiss her, or wrap her up inside of him and take her home. He had come all this way hoping he wouldn’t see her again and desperately wishing she’d track him down. She hadn’t, because he had safeworded on her, and yet, six months later, here she was, looking lost and lonely and hopeless.

            He studied her face for a long time and then said quietly, “Hey, Tasha.”

            She flinched and turned her face slightly, her lips parting so she could breathe. “Hi, Clint.”

            He shoved his hands into his pockets and stared at her. There were too many things that needed to be said. There were too many things he needed to explain. And too many questions that needed to be asked. Guilt crept into his throat and he sighed, looking away, and taking a deep breath.

            “Okay, so,” he began. Then behind him, Kyra called, “Yo! You going to warm up with us or what?”

            He scowled at her over his shoulder. She didn’t care. That was Kyra in a nutshell. He looked back at Natasha whose eyes were a little brighter with a little more amusement. He raised an eyebrow at her. “Stay?”

            She shrugged, then nodded. Clint said quietly, “I want you here. I want you to stay. We need to talk.”

            One of those three sentences did the trick. She closed her eyes, shuddered, and nodded again, this time more of an affirmation than a brush off. She’d stay. Natasha, Clint knew, kept her word. No matter what version of Natasha sat in front of him, she’d be there when he was done with the gig. Until then, he couldn’t tolerate seeing her shivering from the cold or the nerves. He tugged his gray sweater up and over his head and dumped it unceremoniously on her head, just like he used to.

            “Stay classy!” yelled Kyra from the stage.

            He didn’t care because Natasha had smiled and for the first time in six months, Clint Barton felt like smiling back at someone. He went back up on the stage and pulled the guitar strap over his head. He tried not to look at her drowning in his sweater out there in the audience, but it was hard to keep his heart from hammering straight out of his chest.

            They played well. Maybe not their best, but well. The crowd loved them, cheering and hooting as Clint bantered with them between songs, trying to keep his eyes away from the girl who never unfolded from her curled up position in the middle of the room. She was a siren there, with her red hair and her too blue eyes and his sweater sleeves covering her hands. He wanted to jump off the stage and go to her the entire set.

            They get to the end and Clint realizes they’re about to play the two songs he wrote. The others Kyra and Jenny cowrote long before he joined the band. He turned, panicked, to Kyra and covered the mic with his hand. “Let’s sing something else.”

            “Too late. Cowboy up,” Kyra replied. She met his eyes and raised her eyebrows. “Ready?”

            He was so not ready for this. There was nothing in his body that was ready for this. But he started Wishing Well none the less.

“They say hope is a thing with feathers. They say that hope can keep you alive. But I’m drowning in your wishes, and I’m drowning in your dreams. There’s no such thing as hope for you and me,” he murmured into the mic, closing his eyes. The room was still. “It’s lonely down here in a home made of stone. I won’t be your wishing well any longer. These pennies are weighing me down, and all this change can’t be good for our hearts.”  
  
“The world’s a dark place and you were once my light. But all candles burn down when the wind blows cold and wicked. You’ve blown out my dreams to ignite your own. You snuff out of my flame to fan your own. It’s lonely down here in a home made of stone. I won’t be your wishing well any longer. These pennies are weighing me down and all this change can’t be good for our hearts. I’ll make my fire anew, strike flint against stone. Sparks are something we all know. They sit in our hearts, waiting for the right one to help them grow into roaring fires. I’ve learned it is me, not you, who must lift me up. It’s lonely down here in a home made of stone. I won’t be your wishing well any longer. These pennies are weighing me down and all this change can’t be good for our hearts.”

He wrote this song on the drive to Colorado, all those months ago. He sang it every two weeks. But this week, it was going to break him in half. He kept his eyes closed so he didn’t have to see her.

“So I’m going into the wind and the rain and I’m going to swim again. I won’t be your wishing well. I won’t be a snuffed candle any longer. They say hope is a thing with feathers. I’ll grow my wings when I shed the weight of you.”

The crowd roared and he looked down intently at his guitar, changing the grip and fiddling with the tuning, aware of the weight of Kyra’s gaze on him. He glanced at her and she nodded to him, once, firmly. She mouthed the words, _that was amazing_ at him. He didn’t care. He took a deep breath. One more.

“Alright, folks. Last song. It’s a little more hopeful than the last, thank god.” He smiled when the crowd murmured appreciatively.

Then he began to sing Islands.

“Why do we say that lovers break down our walls?  
I didn’t have walls.

I had a moat. I had the ocean around me and I was an island  
And you drifted, restless and eyes reflecting the sea back at me  
Onto my shore.

You didn’t break down my walls. You crossed oceans to me.  
You built me a bridge back to the mainland and when  
I was scared, you built walls around us and said,

I will shelter you.  
And when I wanted to slip in and out of you-  
r, safeness,   
you built me a fire escape and said,  
I am here.

And I thought,

I am the luckiest island.  
You are the most beautiful castaway.  
  
It’s hard to be an island at sea,  
once you’ve been found. There is always  
A way back to you.  
You carry the map to my treasure,   
and your fingers can say here is the spot  
where someone buried your heart a very long time  
ago,  
here, let me.  
Who knew that castaways carried keys?  
Who knew that islands carried treasures?  
Who knew that when you were my safety  
and my fire escape and my bridge,  
I could be your oasis?”

He didn’t dare look up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both of the songs that Clint sings are poems that I wrote :) You won't find them elsewhere!


	10. Clithridiate

Clithridiate (v): to ask for trust without question

 

            Natasha watched Clint, her breath shallow and her hand around the base of her throat, pressing hard against her too warm skin. He looked peaceful, still, in touch with a part of himself that she had never seen before he took the stage with a worn guitar in his hand. She hadn’t even known he could play that well. He had picked at guitars, plucking their strings and running his eyes over them, before, in marks’ houses, at Coulson’s house, in music stores they wandered into when they were trying to forget about the wider world. Right then, as he let the last note of the island song fade and the café erupted into applause and he kept his eyes closed, Natasha knew one thing for sure.

            She would not ask him to come back. She couldn’t ask him that. How could she tear him away from something that was nonviolent and quiet, so peaceful and reliable, and come back to her, the terminally unstable and impossible woman he once knew and the unconditionally violent and unpredictable job he once performed. Natasha played many roles in the world. She played whatever hat she was assigned to wear at any given moment, on any given assignment. She had been made, and unmade, and made again into an actress, someone who could flawlessly nail every part she was offered. It had taken her years to realize that she didn’t need to play a part for Clint Barton. That he asked nothing of her. He gave her no assignments, no pieces to play, no lines to memorize.

            She did not want to ask him to be anything other than who he was. He had never asked that of her. She couldn’t ask him to come back for her. Selfishness, she realized, was not a hat she wanted to wear. And to pull this off, she’d need to act again. She’d need to convince him that she wasn’t acting, and she didn’t need him, and he ought to stay exactly where he was happy. Where he didn’t look afraid to see her. Where he didn’t have to lie when he said he wanted her to stay.

            _Of all the roles,_ she thought to herself, _I have to lie to the person I love the most out of love. Out of love._

            The greatest ironies were the ones that kept us here on earth.

            Clint opened his eyes and met her eyes directly. He said, though she couldn’t hear the words over the applause, “Don’t you leave.”

            She shrugged. He must have known she was thinking about slipping away while he was packing up. She said nothing, but didn’t move. He didn’t need a reply after all these years. If he asked her, she’d stay. For now. There could be no more forevers here and it was strange to Natasha how much that bothered her. She never thought she’d be someone who missed the comfort of someone next to her, the same person in her bed every night, the person she trusted the most and the person she wanted the most being the one and the same. She had forgotten about the fragility of relationships.

            Packing up the band took awhile, especially with people coming up to chat. Natasha ordered another coffee for herself and watched him from beneath half-lowered eyelashes as he shook another hand, laughed with another person he called by their first name, and listened to the girl with the pixie cut dark hair and eyes sharper than glass. The girl wasn’t an idiot. She turned a few times, staring at Natasha with such a venomous look to her face that Natasha could only lift an eyebrow in return.

            “Nat,” Clint said, abruptly in front of her. He sank into the chair in front of her, staring at her intently. She made herself meet the steady lazy gray of his eyes, the kind of gray that melted into the background, absorbing the greens and blues around it. It was his pupils that always entranced her. The way they widened and narrowed, sharpening and swallowing his surroundings whole. He digested the world through his eyes and his hands. She always wondered if he digested her too. “Hi.”

            She put her cup of coffee down and forced herself to unfurl her body, leaning forward slightly. His pupils dilated. She said back in a steady tone, “You look happy.”

            His mouth tensed and the double crease on his brow tightened, deepened, as he sank back into the chair, crossing his arms. He hadn’t lost the tone. She wanted to run her fingers up his biceps. She wanted to run her tongue over his body. She had to take a deep breath to steady her own impulses and desires. Clint glanced over his shoulder to where the pianist with the pixie cut was glaring at Natasha.

            He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Kyra?”

            “You alright there, Chet?” She called back, failing to hide her own disapproval.

            “Fine, Kyra. Go pack the van,” he said back, turning away from her.

            Natasha wanted to roll her eyes at the girl too. She was a child, but then the age gap between Clint and Natasha was not insignificant. Perhaps the girl had reason to be scolding Natasha with her jealous eyes. Natasha’s fingernails bit into the foam coffee cup. “She’s protective of you.”

            “I seem to have a knack for attracting overprotective women,” he began, and then scowled, glaring at his hands. “Goddammit. Shit. I’m sorry. That’s not at all how I intended to say that.”

            She was startled, mostly because she was not sure how he had intended that to be heard. She started to assign Kyra a new place in her mind but then Clint’s hand covered hers, his fingers closing around her fingers. “She’s my bandmate, Natasha. That’s it.”

            Natasha pulled her hand free. “Are you busy?”

            “Not at all,” he said, his eyes brightening.

            “We need to talk, Clint.” She had to force herself to say the words. They could not bumble back into—whatever they’d bumble into—without addressing the fact that he safeworded on her and had disappeared without a word for six months after the worst mission they had ever done together. She hated to be that partner. The one that says that talking will help when it had never helped either of them before.

            To her surprise, Clint didn’t balk. He said, “Here, or should we walk?”

            Her gut said walking. She wanted to move, anxious energy like a bursting dam inside of her, but she also wanted to read his face and not worry about her surroundings. She brushed hair behind her ear. “Here.”

            “Here,” he repeated. “I’m going to get coffee. This isn’t going to be a short talk. Don’t. Go.”

            He disappeared into the long coffee line and as Natasha suspected was going to happen, Kyra hopped off the stage and sat down in his vacated seat. Natasha eyed her calmly. Kyra looked her up and down, as obviously as the girl could manage, and raised her eyebrows.

            “Shit. You’re way out of his league.”

            Natasha allowed her a tiny hint of a smile. It wasn’t what she expected to hear from the girl. “Nice to meet you.”

            “You broke his heart,” Kyra stated firmly, meeting Natasha’s eyes with her brave dark ones. “That’s like…unfuckingforgivable.”

            Natasha was startled, though it was easy to hide the reaction from this girl and her novice eyes. There were many things she could be accused of doing to Clint, and many things she wished she had done differently, but a broken heart had never been one of those possibilities in Natasha’s mind. Had he given them a story of a lover who had left him? It hadn’t occurred to Natasha that he would have told stories about her, that he would have shared anything of a prior life, invented or not, or that he would have blamed her for his middle of the night departure. She remembered the cool glass under her hand and forehead. She remembered whispering in her mind to him.

            “I hope he doesn’t take you back,” Kyra added helpfully. She narrowed her eyes at Natasha. “But he’s a big softie so I’m sure he will. Just so you know, none of us will forgive you for what you did to him.”

            Natasha’s heart ached. She touched the necklace at the base of her neck, the arrow necklace he had given her a long time ago and which she always wore. “Understandable.”

            “Then why are you here?”

            Natasha considered the question and then gave Kyra the truth. “Closure.”

            Kyra gave her a doubtful look. “You should have called him first. Not cool.”

            Natasha shrugged. “He changed his number.”

            “He’d do that,” Kyra murmured, half to herself. She looked over Natasha’s shoulder. “Hi, Chet.”

            He had given them a false name then. Natasha felt him behind her then, warm and steady, like the way he reassured her back in the day. “Kyra.”

            Kyra didn’t move from her chair. Natasha had to give the girl credit. She knew exactly what look she was being leveled right now and the girl stared right back at Clint, her eyes flinty. “Yep.”

            “Get out.”

            Kyra rose and slipped back to the stage, her shoulders proud and squared. Natasha watched her go, and then a body moved in front of her vision as Clint sat back down in his chair. He looked troubled. “What’d she say?”

            Natasha shrugged. Clint grimaced. “She’s trouble.”

            “Careful with her then,” Natasha said, keeping her tone free of any improper comments.

            Clint blinked and then his jaw dropped open. “Natasha. You don’t think I’m _sleeping_ with her.”

            Natasha gripped her coffee cup. “It’s none of my business.”

            “What do you mean—it’s—of course it’s your business!” he blustered at her, fisting a hand in his hair and shaking his head. “For fuck’s sake.”

            “It’s not my business since you safeworded and left me without a single word, explanation, and without contact for six months,” snapped Natasha, rising to his anger with her own, six months of pent up frustration. “Don’t you dare level that against me.”

            He closed his eyes and slumped down in his chair. Natasha’s body quivered at the edge of her chair, and then she leaned back too with a reluctant sigh. They sat there, slumped in their chairs, staring at their coffee mugs. Clint moved his foot and bumped ita against Natasha’s. She knew a deliberate move when she saw one, especially from him, and she didn’t mirror it in her body.

            “I’m not sleeping with Kyra,” he said quietly. “I am not sleeping with anyone, Natasha. I didn’t leave you because I didn’t want to be with _you_. I left because I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t figure out how to level out that close to you.”

            That stung and Natasha began to stand up, ready to leave to her car waiting in the snow outside. He reached for her hand and caught it, stilling her halfway through the movement. He turned her hand over, running his forefinger down the lifeline crossing her palm. She watched him, her throat full of her heart, her heart full of wanting, her mind aching with all of the new truths that filled the spaces between them. Some things were too much to bear.

            “Don’t make this harder than it’s been,” she said, and then swayed a little bit. She had meant to say _don’t make this harder than it needs to be_ , but there it was, the truth was in her words, in the heaviness of a word like _been_. His finger stilled on her palm only briefly, and then he let go of her hand.

            She almost wished he wouldn’t.

            Then he whispered, his voice aching. “He told me he’d make me kill you.”

            Natasha forced herself to sink back into the chair in front of him, their knees bumping together. She studied her own palms, wondering whether Clint saw the same things in the lines of her hands that she saw on the lines of her hands, whether he saw the same things the palmist said when they had visited one in Budapest after everything that had gone down there, both in the mission and in their lives. “He told me too.”

            “Between that, and Phil and all those other agents--,” Clint shook his head. “I couldn’t stay. I thought I was going to climb out of my skin.”

            She wanted to say, _I would have climbed into your skin and kept it warm for you._ But she didn’t say that. She said, “Phil’s okay, Clint.”

            His head lashed upward and he stared at her, full of so much raw emotion that she nearly fell off the chair to her knees. “What?”

            “Phil’s okay. He--,” she blew out a harsh breath through her teeth. “Fucking SHIELD. Mind games on people fucked by mind games.”

            The corner of his mouth twitched and he said, reaching for her hand again, “I’d find that funny if I weren’t so confused.”

            “Life model decoy,” Natasha recited and then met Clint’s eyes. “He’s alive. And he’s well. And he is worried about you.”

            “Did he send you here?” Clint asked, the doubt filling his voice. She knew what he was warring with in his mind. He wanted her there on her own accord, and he simultaneously liked the idea of his former lover sending her to find him. He couldn’t have it both ways, but he wanted it anyway.

            “No. He was pissed when I left.”

            Clint tilted his head, studying her the way he watched a mark. Then he sat back, his fingers sliding off her hands. She found that she missed them. “You went AWOL.”

            Natasha shrugged.

            Clint reached forward, taking her hand and lacing their fingers together. He tugged and she refused to move, refused to let him pretend everything was okay enough for him to pull her into his lap, refused to let him pretend they had both been on emotional missions and the post-mission letdown could begin now. She refused. He didn’t seem to mind. He turned over her hands, pushed up her bracelets, touched the veins in her wrists, stretching her fingers and admiring the way the tendons and ligaments of her hands and arms moved. He often liked this, the careful examination of her body as a mechanical structure. She never understood why, but she didn’t mind it then. Now, it made her wary and uncomfortable.

            He glanced up when she tensed. “I don’t know that I could have stayed, even without the safeword.”

            “Stayed with me,” she asked, like it was the hardest thing she had ever said, “or stayed here, at all.”

            “Either.” He let go of her hands which fell limp into her lap. He touched her cheek with his fingertips, not cupping her face, not stroking, not doing anything but touching his fingertips to her cheek. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from his sea-sky eyes. “Sometimes leaving is arriving.”

            She closed her eyes to avoid reaching for him at those words. “Clint.”

            “Natasha.”

            She opened her eyes. “I wanted to know if you were happy.”

            “Happy’s relative,” he said quietly. “Are you happy?”

            She pulled her face away from his fingers and he didn’t seem the least bit insulted, withdrawing his hands to his coffee cup that he lifted to his mouth, still watching her. She thought about whether she was happy. She tried to think about if she had ever been happy. There were moments where she thought her life hadn’t turned out as terribly as she once feared. But that was a far cry from happiness.

            “I don’t know,” she admitted with a small and helpless shrug. She sipped her coffee. “Are you staying here?”

            “Are you asking me to leave?” he countered.

            She pressed her lips together and then shook her head slowly. “No. I am not asking you to leave, Clint.”

            He studied her for a long moment. “You staying for a few days?”

             In another life, she would have reached out and touched him then, letting her hands and fingers soothe out the worry lines on his face, in the scruff along his jaw, in his carefully guarded eyes. That life did not exist anymore. So she leveled him the same look back, cautious and guarded, that he gave her.

            “Only if I’m wanted.”

            Clint lifted her hand and pressed it against his cheek so she could feel the vibrations of his words when he said back, “You are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Sometimes leaving is arriving" is a line inspired by a line from an Andrea Gibson poem. The line is "You don't have to leave to arrive" (I've used the line before to title another fic. I have a lot of feels about that whole poem, but especially that line.)


	11. Runcation

**Runcation** (v): Permission to use physical outlets instead of speaking

            He hadn’t meant to leave her like he had six months ago. But his mind had not been his own, fractured and unwhole, filled with blue light and edged with kaleidoscope colors, her voice occasionally distant, and then all at once too close. She had slept next to him like nothing changed, like he hadn’t tried to kill her, like she still trusted him, tucked in against her shoulder, her arm across his chest, her mouth partially opened to a half-hearted kiss to her shoulder where there were scars from her knives from years ago. He had tried, gone to see Loki off the next morning, smiled when he was supposed to smile, driven off with her when he was supposed to drive off with her.

            Play-acting. Every moment of it. Her touch felt like fire and ice. Her gaze felt too heavy. Her voice made it hard for him to breath. Every step he took seemed agonizing. Every noise came with a bright flash of blue light in his mind and the terrible, horrifying fear that he was no longer himself, that he was no longer his own person. He had watched Natasha go through the making and unmaking of her mind twice, had held her hand through the second time, and he had never once thought about how utterly frightening it was to fight every step, but to feel one’s body propelled forward without consequence. He had not been his own person. And for all of Clint’s troubles and faults, he had always rested on that one fact, that he alone was responsible for his actions.

            It was so much worse when he was not. When he killed without wanting to kill. When he left his lover without wanting to leave her. When he couldn’t stand being anywhere near the person he loved because a person he hated had twisted his mind, shattered it on a sidewalk in broad daylight, and moved him like a pawn on an intergalactic chessboard.

            He had not felt that inconsequential in a very long time.

            He had not felt that abused since he was a child.

            Was it so hard to believe he left?

            He meant it when he told her that sometimes leaving was arriving. Clearcreek had been good to him. He rented a room without much fuss, paying in cash without any questions asked, and he jammed with a band. He read books and went for walks. No one had asked anything of him until the band started to play these gigs. It had been an easy way to allow responsibility, consequences, deadlines, and a schedule sink back into his life. It had sharpened a mind that had become dull by necessity. Everything had been too sharp when he first found Clearcreek. Then everything had been blurry and unsure. He was finally finding his feet.

            Meanwhile, the woman in front of him looked like she no longer trusted her own body and her own feet. She looked wary, guarded, and overly cautious. She held herself away from him, watched him touch her palm with an expression of muted interest, had not flinched a single finger when he held her hand against his cheek. It frightened him, her stillness, the level of control she had reestablished over herself in his presence. He had become so accustomed to the way she let herself go around him, let all of the masks slide off her face so she was nothing more than a fallible, beautiful woman who liked to wear his old t-shirts and ate icecream straight out of the carton on the couch, licking the spoon in obscene ways.

            The woman in front of him was layered like a hologram.

            She was a shadow of his Natasha.

            His.

            His.

            His.

            The possessive had never been enough. In a way, he thought that might have been his greatest fear. That he wanted so much from her that someone, anyone, could climb into his mind and take his greatest weaknesses and use them to manipulate his hands onto her neck, the slow and steady pressure of life leaking from her eyes under his own strength. His weaknesses never changed the strength of his body. He frequently wished they would. But at his heart, he was afraid that she would leave him, that he was insecure and unsure, wary of loving her when she seemed adamantly unable to vocalize her own emotions. It was hard, he knew, to be in love with a matryoshka doll.

            Natasha looked tired and defeated, turning her coffee cup around in circles on the table. She came there looking for him, against orders and without permission, bearing news that Coulson lived, looking world-weary in ways that even New York hadn’t put on her face, and she was still sitting there. Through all of her fear, and all of her apprehension coming off her in steady waves, she was still sitting there with him.

            Perhaps she wasn’t as far from being his Natasha as he had thought.

            He ran his finger down her palm, down her fate line and her life line, down her head line and her heart line. He wondered what the palmist said to her in Budapest that had turned her mute for the rest of the day, staring at her hands in wonder and awe. Natasha had once said that if she could take any one of her body parts away, she’d chop off both her hands because they had committed so many horrors in the world.

            He had kissed her hands then, slid them up his own body to his face where he held them against his mouth and pressed his lips against their softness. She had pulled away, a flush crawling from her chest up her neck to her face, and then taken his hand. It had been the first time she held his hand in public.

            He lifted her palm to his mouth then, sitting in a café in the town where he was supposed to be anyone other than Clint Barton, Hawkeye, partner and lover of Natasha Romanov, Black Widow. He kissed her palm and her pupils widened, swallowing the dark blue.

            “I drove until I found somewhere that felt safe,” he began, and then kissed her wrist. He felt the blood throbbing in her veins. She tried to tug her hand free and he obligingly lowered it from his mouth but didn’t let go. “This was the first place that felt okay.”

            Her eyes darted over his shoulder to Kyra. “What made it okay?”

            “No one gave a shit about New York,” he admitted. “No one recognized me. No one gave a shit about me. I blended in. It was easy enough.”

            “And why’d you stay?” The million dollar question. It must have cost her a fortune in courage. He wanted to pull her onto his lap and bury his face in her hair, kiss her neck, her throat, feel her pulse against his tongue.

            “I’m trying to figure out if my feet are my own,” he said because he didn’t know what else to say.

            She lifted her chin slightly. “Leveling out takes time.”

            “Have you?” he asked her, letting his voice rise a little, carrying a little force with it to her. “Did you level out?”

            Her smile was twisted and sad, but it was real. It was the first glimpse of Natasha he had seen the entire time she sat there. “I crashed and burned.”

            “Tasha,” he managed to say.

            She pulled her hand back to her own lap. “You would stay here forever if I hadn’t shown up.”

            It was a question, not a statement. He shook his head. “Not true. I think I finally began to feel stable a few weeks ago. I’d have come back.”

            Her look was doubtful. “We’ll never know.”

            “You broke the safeword,” he reminded her in turn, determined not to be the only one who carried doubt in their bones. “Why are you here?”

            “Why am I here, or why’d it take so long? Stark tracked you down months ago. I chose to respect the safeword.”

            “Then why are you here?”

            She blinked, swallowed. “I needed to know. Whether it was over for sure. I can’t—limbo is not a pretty place for me to be.”

            He could understand that. And her doubt. He had been starting to find his way back out of the nightmares, into a person who slept normally, moved normally, thought normally. He had thought about calling her, or emailing her. He thought about the breadcrumbs he left for her in the band name, in an interview he gave where he said his favorite drink was Mango Siberian Sunrise. He had once called her that when they woke up in a fire tower in Russia, cold to the bone and forced into the same sleeping bag, and she had tried to punch him at close range.

            “I’m finally out of limbo,” he said. “I get it.”

            “I think I only just realized I was in limbo,” she said, a very soft sigh escaping her mouth. “I’m only beginning to level out.”

            “Coulson?” he asked.

            Natasha shrugged. “It’s hard without you there. We don’t know how to interact with each other without you there to filter us.”

            It was strange to imagine his former lover and lover—wait, former lover too?—standing in a room together without him, probably discussing him. “And the others?”

            “Complicated,” Natasha murmured, sounding distracted. He watched her eyes shadow, and fall in and out of focus. He caught her hand and pressed his thumb straight down into the center. She blinked, her eyes coming back to the present and focusing on him. She graced him with a thankful look. “Hi.”

            “Hey.” He said, avoiding the question of where she went when she went away. Sometimes, he thought his own words back to himself, leaving is arriving. He wondered where she was arriving. He wondered where she left.

            “I need a game plan,” she said finally, making no move to pull her hand back away from him.

            He scratched the back of her hand with one of his fingers. “Come back tomorrow. Same time.”

            “That’s not a game plan. That’s a request.”

            It was banter too close to how they planned missions. She’d ask him for the plan and he’d suggest she kill the mark. He didn’t look into her eyes then, because he didn’t want to see the way she didn’t give him a darkly amused glare the way she used to out in the field. He didn’t want to miss anything anymore than he missed everything.

            “I don’t know how to make game plans anymore,” he said slowly, running his thumb in a circle on her palm. “I don’t know whether I’m happy. I don’t know what’s at stake here.”

            “Okay,” she agreed and pulled her hands from his again, tucking her knees under her chin. “Mission objective.”

            He met her eyes then. “Is the mission objective getting me back to work, or getting me back with you?”

            “It’s not my mission,” she said. “You’re the one that left.”

            He sat back and crossed his arms. “Fair point.”

            The corner of her mouth twitched. “I know.”

            “I don’t know if I’m ready to be back in the field,” he said, trying to press as much truth and honesty into his voice.

            She nodded. “Okay.”

            “And I realize I’m starting in the red here,” he added carefully, “but I’m glad you’re here. I think,” he hesitated and looked away for a long moment. To his surprise, Natasha reached out, touching his knee with her hand. He stared at her fingers. “I think I was testing you. I was—am. Fuck. Am. Am afraid. You shouldn’t love me. Not after what I did. So maybe the mission objective is to see if we can both move past that.”

            “That being New York and its aftermath,” she suggested, giving him an out. She could have just as easily said that ‘that’ represented the part where he left her for six months with no explanation and seemingly without caring.

            He picked her hands off his knees and held them to his face so he didn’t have to look at her but he so badly wanted to keep touching her. “What happens if we’re too broken, Nat?”

            “Then we trust each other to say that,” she said, a gentle admonishment for his midnight departure. “We owe each other that, Clint.”

            “Where are you staying?” he asked her, peering at her through her fingers.

            Her fingers arched against his skin and his blood warmed. “At the Sheraton.”

            He made a face. “Gross. Did you wipe down the mattress?”

            “It’s not that bad. When’d you get picky?”

            “When I put myself in exile and sleeping alone,” he admitted. He was rewarded with a shy soft look in her too blue eyes. “Come back with me.”

            “Clint.”

            “I’ll sleep on the couch. Don’t stay in the hotel. How do we know if we’re going to be able to handle each other again if we’re not spending time together?”

            Her sigh was audible. He couldn’t tell if it was reluctant or longing. “I’m afraid.”

            He pulled her hands down and pressed them together as if they were praying. “Me too.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize I'm wandering a bit...bear with me? This chapter was not on the outline haha. I'm exhausted and just wanted to walk a bit in Clint's head again.


	12. Strikhedonia

**Strikhedonia (v): a request to the other partner to provide reasons to stay**

 

Clint rented rooms on the third story of someone’s house. One bedroom, a couch near a small dining room table, a fridge, and a hot plate. It wasn’t anything fancy. It wasn’t any of their hidey holes anywhere in the world. It was not their apartment. But there was a photo of them taped to the fridge, an article about the Captain on the table, and her favorite type of vodka in the freezer. Natasha had to sink into a chair at the tiny table and put her head in her hands when she took it all in. Clint was in his bedroom changing into clean clothes (he was taking her out for dinner. She reminded him they didn’t do dates. He said maybe now they did. She had no idea where they stood. She wasn’t sure if they were even standing.)

            He moved past her into the kitchen, nearly silent on his bare feet. She watched him move, the grace of his body, the shape of him that she used to know. He opened the fridge and took out a carton of orange juice. She smiled faintly as he poured them each a glass and thunked it onto the table in front of her. He sat in the seat across from her and lifted his glass.

            “To scurvy,” he said with a dry sort of smile.

            She lifted her glass. “To scurvy.”

            Once they had been stuck for weeks up in a small cabin in the mountain range separating Bosnia and Serbia during the middle of a blizzard. Turned out that neither of them had been good at getting their daily allotment of Vitamin C (SHIELD prescribed all its field agents daily vitamins but Clint didn’t like putting unnecessary things into his body and Natasha didn’t trust organizations enough to take a pill she didn’t watch them prepare individually each day). They were stuck for three weeks before they were able to safely ski out. They both had mild scurvy symptoms by the time they got Stateside again. The teasing from Coulson had been relentless.

            Natasha jutted her chin at the fridge. “Ballsy to have a photo of us up there.”

            “Our pictures were all over the paper,” he said, not even turning around to look at the photo. “I figured it was all out there anyway.”

            He wasn’t wrong. SHIELD had gone to bat for Natasha. It’s not like the world didn’t know she worked for SHIELD anyway. Everyone who mattered knew, she had figured. But her covers got deeper. Her disguises a little better. Sometimes they wanted people to know she was the Black Widow though. Sometimes people would let her get close just because no one ever remembers how mortal they are. Death happens to others, not to them. Then it did. Natasha didn’t have enough sentimentality in her body to waste it on the deep irony of her namesake and some of her marks.

            “If you hadn’t invited me back today,” Natasha decided to admit to Clint, “I’d have thought that you put it up there after you saw me at the café. That it was a trick.”

            He lifted his eyes to her, studying her. She liked the way his eyelashes were still streaked with blonde, the way his hair was caught somewhere between light brown and blonde, like it couldn’t decide. His golden lashes were beautiful. She never told him that.

            “I know,” he said, like he had made a decision to make an admission too. “It’s part of the reason I wanted you to come today. So you can see that none of this is pretense.”

            He was trying to find out whether his feet were his own. She was trying to find if her heart had ever been her own. They were both trying to find out if they were broken together as much as they were broken apart. They were a mess, a one thousand piece puzzle missing all its straight edge pieces. There were no corners, just mottled colors. They wouldn’t ever be complete, she thought, but they could put most of the puzzle together. It’d take most of her patience and she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t end up throwing a stiletto at a wall in the near future, but she found that the longer she sat next to him, the more she wanted him.

            Nothing in her bones said run.

            Nothing inside her sang, either.

            Her body and mind were dormant under grief she did not fully understand.

            “Where do you go?” The question was abrupt and dragged her back to the surface. He was running his fingers around the rim of the orange juice glass. He did not look at her. “When you go off like that.”

            “Nowhere,” she said and meant it honestly. He didn’t move or reply. She tried again. “Sometimes I wish I had more words.”

            His eyes moved upward to hers for a heartbeat and she knew that she had said something that rang true in him. His reply was too carefully chosen. “For yourself or for others?”

            She thought about that for a moment. “Both.”

            He nodded and they sat in a shared silence that was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. Then finally, he leaned forward, opened his mouth, and frowned at his own hands on the table. “If I had more words, I wouldn’t have had to safeword.”

            She wanted to go back to the old days, when she’d call him Captain Obvious and he’d wink at her and make some sort of lewd joke. There was no common ground for how to handle any of this complicated ground between them.

            She said, “You did what you had to do.”

            “Nat,” he said, turning over his hands as if some sort of answer were written in the lines on his palm. “You know me better than anyone else. Ever. But—christ on a bike this is hard—“

            “Barton,” Natasha said warningly.

            He glanced up, his mouth thinning into a careful smile. “Sorry. Look, I didn’t know either—when I leave, it’s hard for me to come back.”

            She turned the words around in her head the way he examined his hands. He meant, she thought, that when he left in his mind, he couldn’t come back. Not all the way. And he meant, in another way, that when he left that apartment that night, he didn’t know how to turn around his words and walk back into her life. And he meant, in a way she did not fully understand yet, that he wouldn’t come back to the life they had the way before. And wouldn’t was different than couldn’t.

            The risk assessment was hers. To stay was to accept his difficulties in coming back, in all of its manifestations. To leave was to leave forever. There was a finality on the table between their cups of orange juice, jokes about scurvy, and carefully placed words between their fingertips.

            “I don’t know how to do anything other than come back,” she said at last, meeting his eyes. “That’s all I’ve ever known how to do.”

            “You said I had to level out,” he said.

            She lifted a shoulder slightly, letting it fall and relax her body. “The way a boomerang levels out.”

            His smile was crooked and hopeful, cracking through the walls she had begun to rebuild around her heart. “I can be a boomerang.”

            She ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “I’m willing to wait.”

            There were risks worth taking. She knew that.

The first time: she hid food up her sleeve for another girl at the Red Room.

The second time: she took a few days off, stopped checking in with her handlers, sat on a rooftop for awhile, met a sniper with an unusual skillset and choice of weapons, and decided to visit SHIELD.

The third time: he suggested that he kiss her and she negotiated an entire set of rules and safewords before she let him kiss her like he knew parts of her history that she didn’t know.

The fourth time: aliens attacked New York.

And here, here was the fifth time.

            There were risks worth taking. Sometimes, they were people.

            She said, “I think you owe me dinner.”

            He pushed back his chair and fetched keys out of his jacket pocket, twirling them in the air. “I think I do. What’ll it be?”

            “I can’t imagine Clearcreek has too many options,” she said, following him out the door. “What are the choices?”

            “There’s an Italian place, a pizza place, a little café called Epic—“

            “That,” she said.

            He gave her an amused look over his shoulder as they ran down the metal stairs on the fire escape and his car beeped as they approached. “You don’t even know what they serve.”

            “I’m a fan of rewarding cafes with good names,” she said. “And lead singers of bands with good names. I’m into names.”

            “You always did like words,” he said. “Get in.”

             Dinner turned into a turkey sandwich, split in half, a bag of chips between them, and a lot of talk. She told him about getting back to missions, about Coulson, about the Avengers and about Stark. He told her about founding the band, about his nightmares, about learning to snowboard after years of skiing solely for missions. She told him about not sleeping and he told her about sleeping too much with the aid of too many pills, prescribed by doctors who didn’t know him and the way his mind liked to cling to anything that made the rest of the world drift away.

            “That’s probably why I couldn’t fight Loki out of my head,” he said, digging into the chip bag.

            “You couldn’t fight him out of your head because he is an alien god,” she corrected him. She grabbed his wrist, where his watch tan startled her. How long had it been since he fired a bow?

            He read her mind, like he always could. “Been keeping myself sharp with a gun. Haven’t touched any of my bows.”

            “You didn’t take all of them,” she said.

            “I took the ones I thought I might need,” he said.

            “And your gun,” she remembered.

            He peeled her fingers off his arm. “I thought I might end it. Just to be sure.”

            She kicked him under the table. “That’s a pretty shitty extraction plan.”

            He snorted. “Like you and I ever work with extraction plans.”

            “Exactly,” she said softly. “We don’t. We improvise and rely on each other. We’re partners, Barton. We’re more than partners.”

            “Still?” He asked.

            She used to know him like she knew the lines on her hands. She used to know him better than she knew herself. And she didn’t anymore. He was familiar, in the way the darkness was familiar. And she tripped over stumbling blocks and slipped down paths of his persona and his experiences she didn’t understand. Yet. Yet. Yet.

            “Still,” she affirmed, and stole the last chip. 


	13. Illuminate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the long absence, everyone! <3 Give me this chapter to get back into the rhythm of things.

Six days, four hours, and thirty seven minutes after Natasha came to Clearcreek, Clint turned around at the door to his apartment, and _saw her_. Fucking _saw_ her. All of these days spent walking around and talking. Flopped on a couch legs against each other, their heads occupying opposite ends, watching their favorite TV shows and arguing about plot lines. All of these minutes and hours learning where they had gone wrong and where they had gone right. Where the bridges remained between them, splintered half-assed footbridges built years ago when they didn’t realize that eventually their entire relationship would rely upon their ability to cross the wild divides between them. And they found those bridges. They fixed them. Built new ones. They touched only as friends did and as they had in public all those years. Even in the safety of his apartment, he didn’t reach for her because Clint Fucking Barton knew better.

            And still, he felt like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. He saw her texting someone and when he asked who it was, feeling like an overcontrolling dick just to ask the question, she had told him it was Stark. He couldn’t remember when Natasha and Stark became friends, but Natasha laughed at something Stark texted. Laughed. An honest to god, uninterrupted, unanticipated, unplanned laugh right from her belly. And it was like an earthquake to Clint’s heart. And for the first time in Clint’s life, he was waking up, hard and wanting, aching to roll over and find her there beside him. She was never there. She slept on his couch and she always woke before him, just like she used to, months ago, in their other life. When he walked out into the living room/kitchen area, she was always awake with breakfast made, reading a book, her hair tucked behind her ear.

            He missed being able to surprise her. To roll over and see her unput together. To see her messy and disheveled. Young and rumpled. He missed seeing her with hair stuck to her mouth. He missed the way she hooked her fingers inside the waistband of his boxers and fell asleep, holding onto him just like that.

            God, he hadn’t even realized how much his desire and libido had gone into hibernation until he had seen Natasha wearing his sweatshirt and a pair of cut-off sweat pants jumping up and down at the oven, making scrambled eggs and trying to stay warm. He had laughed at her then and she gave him a scowl, but the kind of scowl she gave him when she was delighted by his amusement.

            “It’s fucking cold, Barton,” she muttered. “Jesus.”

            “December, love,” he said without thinking. “Colorado. December. Cold.”

            He had sucked in a breath when he dropped the affectionate pet name without thinking but Natasha pretended not to hear it. She scooped out the eggs and dumped them on the plate. “I forgot how much I hated the cold.”

            “You make for a terrible Russian,” he said, and took the plate from her.

            She smiled at the pan. “Yeah. I know.”

            And so they prodded at the edges of each other. Stumbled over each other’s triggers and mood swings. Relearned each other.

            Six days.

            Four hours.

            Thirty seven minutes.

            They came back from dinner at Epic (again. It was becoming their thing) and were laughing over some absurd conspiracy theory about the Avengers that Natasha had found on the internet. Clint turned around to shut the door and lock it over Natasha’s head, when he caught her gaze. And fuck if he knew exactly what flipped the switch inside of him. But there was something terribly raw and hungry in the darkening blue of her gaze and in the inches between them, the air crackled, sparked with electricity Clint hadn’t felt bursting from him in months. Since the last time he saw her before New York.

Since…god, he couldn’t even fucking remember because now, now, now, he needed to close the distance between them. He turned the lock and took a step toward her, framing her body with his hips and shoulders, and she let him back her against the door. He kept his arm up, giving her an escape if she wanted it, but she didn’t take it. Her body hit the door with a thud and she tilted her chin up, and it was all the invitation that Clint needed. And not enough. He had burned that footbridge himself when he safeworded and left to test her love and affection for him.

He pressed his thumb into the dimple her chin made when her lips trembled. “Natasha.”

“Clint,” and her lips curved into a small smile. “Yes.”

She knew he was asking for permission and she gave it. The person who told him that the Black Widow was unforgiving had no idea that beneath the catsuit and the beautiful painted face was a woman more capable of forgiveness than all the people who came before her in Clint’s life.

He kissed her gently. _An apology_.

He kissed her firmly. _A promise._

This time, she stuttered her lips over his, pulling his hips flush against hers and she whimpered a little, just enough, that Clint’s brain flipped into static white noise, and the next time his mouth crashed into hers, it was a little harder than necessary. Maybe. Or maybe it was just as hard as it needed to be. Leveling out like a boomerang. It’d always come back to her, he realized. _He’d_ always come back to her. This, with their bodies pressed against each other, with hands and fingers that were only cautiously gaining courage and speed in exploring each other, with their mouths caressing and asking and pressing and encouraging each other, this was where he didn’t have to worry about the layers of grief and anger and trauma piling onto them.

It was easier with her. Everything would always be easier with her. She never asked anything of him. She had let him leave and now she was letting him grind against her at the door of his apartment like he was some horny teenage boy all over again.

Not that she wasn’t grinding back. Don’t get him wrong. She was definitely grinding back.

So it came as a bit of a surprise when his fingers slipped into her jeans and she tore her mouth from his and said, “No.”

He stilled instantly and took a breath, clearing his mind. He pressed his forehead to hers. “No to anything, or no to that.”

She pulled his hand back up to her mouth and sucked his fingers into her mouth. Her mouth was warm and wet and fucking hell she knew exactly what she was doing. She whispered. “Not that. Bed, Clint.”

That was easy enough. He could worry about everything else later.

 


	14. Salvation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Smut! Skip if that's not your thing :)

 

            In Spanish, body parts did not belong to the individual. _Las manos_. The hands. Not her hands, his hands, their hands, hands that belonged to a body. The hands, the hands that touched her, caressed her, tickled her ribs, traced her scars, found all of her edges, found all of her curves, and loved, loved, loved every one of them. She finally understood, there in the dark of his too-cold apartment in the middle of nowhere after too long, why they were _the hands_.

And she fell in love all over again with the way that his hands, which had killed people, which had held a bowstring taught for hours, waiting for the right shot, which had saved her life, and fucked her, and fucked others for all she knew—Coulson, at least, others, she was sure—they did not frighten her.

Even when they had slipped beneath her waistband, it hadn’t been his _fingers_ or his _hands_ that had frightened her. It had been the action, upright, against a wall, that felt too much like the last mission. Like getting fingerfucked against her will. She wasn’t ready to call that anything else. Not yet.

But in the bed, he stripped her of her clothing like he still understood the rules of their relationship: she wanted to be dressed or naked, nothing in between. She disliked doing things in halves and that was one of them. It felt too much like a job if she kept clothing on, like her shirt or a bra, while he fucked her. So she was divested of most of her clothing before her back even hit the bed. Normally, he’d be on her in a second, spinning her upward, higher and higher like he knew exactly how to do.

Here, he was careful. His hands, on her. His mouth exploring. Cautiously. With hesitation she was unaccustomed to from and part of her was desperate for him to move faster, go faster, get over it and on with it. It had been a long time since they had been in bed together like this and there was an itch to be scratched. Then as she opened her mouth to scold him, her heart skipped a beat and pounded. She dug her fingers into his shoulder and decided that maybe, just maybe, this once, it’d be fine if they were too cautious with each other. If maybe too cautious was just right for just now.

His mouth found her breast, found her nipple and she closed her eyes against the dizzying effect of his tongue on her, his lips holding her still. She arched against him, using her heel to pull him closer. He was shirtless, but it wasn’t enough, even as he kissed her, a hand holding her hair a little tightly, the way she liked it, and rocked against her, hard through his jeans. Her fingers fumbled for his belt and he nipped her lower lip. He could turn her world into a kaleidoscope, without being inside of her. She marveled at that. No one else ever could do that.

He kissed his way down her body, sliding her hands off his belt. She made a disturbingly desperate sound at that and she felt his teeth against her cunt when he smiled. Then his mouth, kissing her, once, carefully, gently.

He looked up at her from where he lay between her legs and said, “Is this okay?”

Oh god, there he was, all muscles and gray eyes and wonder and fuck she had missed him. Fuck she had missed. Fuck and it wasn’t just that, it was that he thought to ask. It was that after all these years and all this time, he still understood what had happened outside the bedroom meant he needed to check in. That he _wanted_ to check in.

“Yes,” she whispered.

His mouth straightened the earth on its axis.

His hands kept her hips still, kept her from sinking down and riding his face, maintained control from his tongue to her cunt. Made sure she was exactly where he wanted her to be when she came, on his tongue, so when he slipped up her body and kissed her, she tasted herself. He didn’t mind that she kissed with a little more tongue than usual, just to capture that sweetness. He was expecting it. She always liked herself in his mouth.

He finally lost the pants and they wasted little time after that, him sliding into her with a soft expletive, his hands framing her face, her fingers finding the dozens of scars on his back from New York, Budapest, Baghdad, and then, the one from Iowa, all those years ago. His hips rocked, finding a place deep inside of her that sent an electric shock up her spine, bounced her heart back into rhythm, rubbed salve on the new scars she’d earned since he’d left her.

“Natasha,” he said, and her body went rigid. He stilled and she inhaled softly, letting the name settle in her veins. He touched his forehead to hers, gently and softly , his lips trembling against her upper lip. “You there?”

She softened and relaxed, closing her eyes. Natasha. Right now, she was just Natasha. She was Nat and Tasha and Natashka and kitten and love and all the things that only people she loved were allowed to call her.

His—Clint’s---hand skimmed down her side, over her hip and to her ass. He lifted her leg slightly and she obediently lifted it up, sliding it over his shoulder. He didn’t have to move for everything to light up inside of Natasha.

She ran a hand up to his cheek, to the bristles on his cheek. “I’m here.”

Here, his mouth sang against her skin. Here, he sank deep inside of her, his rhythm picking up. Here, his hands whispered, his fingers steadying her. Home, home, home, her body sang as she came with him, sinking through the night and the memories and the places they’d been to land here. In the present. Exactly where she was supposed to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for being patient, everyone! I appreciate every single one of you :)
> 
> (Also, now that we're here, this fic clearly takes place without Captain America: The Winter Soldier canon in place.)


	15. Iktsuarpok

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As some of you know, I write regular fiction as well. This year I sold a book! Which is super exciting and amazing but it's also taken up a lot of my normal writing time because contracts and deadlines and so on. I really apologize for how crappy I've been at tying up loose ends in my fic but I'm going to try and get some done tonight :) Thank you everyone for all of your patience!

_Iktsuarpok_

_(An Inuit word that is mostly untranslatable but can be best described as a word that means: “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.”)_

 

Phil’s phone went off sometime after four in the morning from an unknown number. He didn’t get unknown numbers. There shouldn’t be such a thing on his phone. SHIELD phones ID’d any phone calling in, even a burner phone [“Temp Phone” told him a lot about who was calling]. So naturally, he knew exactly who it was.

He rolled over in bed and sat up as he answered. “Coulson.”

“What happened in Budapest?”

Clint’s voice after all these months was both disarming and arresting, demanding and professional, cool and aloof. He was brilliant, Phil realized, at throwing people off guard. People thought Natasha was the only one who knew how to work people with just her voice alone but so did Clint. Phil couldn’t remember if this is how Clint always was, or if this was a sign of Natasha’s influence on him. He couldn’t decide if it mattered.

“I can’t tell you that,” Phil said wearily. “You’re a fugitive, Clint. I’ve got a mark out on you.  SHIELD wants you brought in.”

“Fuck your rules.” Clint’s voice cut right across from demanding to hoarse.

Phil turned on his bedside lamp. “What happened? Is she okay?”

“You’ve never given a _fuck_ if she’s okay,” Clint snapped.

Phil drew in a sharp breath and Clint swore colorfully in a language Phil couldn’t immediately identify. Clint muttered, “Sorry. That was out of hand.”

Phil hesitated and said quietly, “I deserved it. But I meant what I asked, Clint.”

“She’s fine,” Clint said and Phil closed his eyes as he could _hear_ Clint raking his fingers through his hair. “No, she’s not fine. I mean it, Phil. You want me back? Tell me what happened in Budapest. I’m flying blind here and there are a shitload of landmines in her head.”

“Mixing metaphors,” Phil said. 

“Fuck your metaphors,” Clint replied, his voice finally relaxing. “Why Budapest? Jesus, did you not remember last time?”

“I don’t forget anything,” Phil told him, letting his words frost over a little bit but Clint doesn’t take the bait. Just remained silent and waiting. And there, Phil knew, was an admission of loyalty. Clint chose Natasha. Phil chose Clint. Natasha chose Clint. In the end, Phil knew this was all how it ended. He didn’t inspire the ferocious loyalty in others that Clint and Natasha did. Maybe he wasn’t broken enough. Maybe he wasn’t enough. He’d never know, he decided, and he’d been using them against each other for his own gain for too long.

“She got herself cornered,” Phil said. “And she didn’t safeword out. They roughed her up.”

“They touched her.”

“I didn’t have video feed but yes, I think they did.”

“No, I’m telling you. They touched her.” 

Which meant that Clint touched her. That was the only way he could know. Phil got up and padded to his flat’s kitchen. He wasn’t going back to sleep. That was clear. “She didn’t do well when we put her back in the field.”

“After I left.”

“After New York,” Phil said. “She did missions without you, you know.”

“There’s a difference between knowing you’re in the field alone, and knowing you’re alone, Phil,” Clint said and his voice was so gentle, so kind that Phil suddenly couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t finish pressing start on his coffee machine. Clint sighed and said, “She looked like she was Natalia again, when she showed up here last week.”

“She looked like Natalia here too,” Phil said, making himself hit the button. “Why’d you leave?”

“Because I didn’t know how to stay. I think in retrospect those weren’t my only choices but it sure as fuck felt like that.” Phil heard the telltale beeps of a microwave. It was almost as good as having coffee in person. He watched the coffee drip down into his mug as Clint kept talking. “I’m glad you let her come find me, you know. I wanted to come back, but I didn’t know how anymore. Which is weird, I know. But you get stuck in places.”

_Don’t I know it,_ Phil thought, his hand coming up to touch the scars on his chest. Dead, alive, he didn’t know day to day.

Clint paused and said, “She needs time, Phil. And so do I. But this time, we need to do this together.”

“I know,” Phil said. He dumped a spoonful of sugar into his coffee. He heard Clint’s fridge open and shut. So he was making coffee for Natasha too then. She was the only person on the team who liked milk but no sugar in her coffee. “I can give you two weeks.”

“A month,” Clint said. “A month, and I promise we’ll both come back, skill-sharp and mentally balanced.”

“Three weeks,” Phil countered. He had a mission in a month he really would like to put them on, and he needed them to be settled back on base before he put them out in the field. “Twenty one days. But Clint, if she can’t do it or if you can’t, don’t lie to me. Don’t shut me out.”

“Don’t send us to Budapest and we’ll be fine,” Clint said.

Phil felt the end of the conversation coming. “Clint?”

“Yeah?”

He swallowed. “I heard your band’s pretty good.”

“Yeah,” Clint said after a pause. “We are.”

Phil sipped his coffee to buy himself time, and to summon the courage. “I’d like to hear you play sometime.”

Clint blew air out hard. “Okay. As long as you don’t fake die on me again. God, Phil. I don’t even know how to tell you how gutted—.”

“I know,” Phil interrupted him. “I get it.”

“You don’t, but that’s okay,” Clint said in that upsettingly gentle voice again. “I don’t want her to wake up alone. I should go. But I’ll see you in twenty one days.”

“Yes,” Phil said, but the line already was already dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um. Phil has issues. But don't worry! They will be handled.


End file.
